Whose message is the PKK carrying again?

We have once again been caught, and so it seems in a far heavier spiral of violence. These are conditions that readily suggest "the end of words." But nearly everyone is speaking and saying everything. Terror makes everyone remarkably talkative.

A significant portion of those who speak are busy interpreting the intentions of those who carried out the attack. It is as if the speakers are trying to explain what a message sent in another language and through symbolic expressions means.

What the organization expresses with its style of action is, on the surface, to prove its dominance over the field and that it is an indisputable party to the solution of the problem.

Those who step forward claiming to be more competent at interpreting this mode of expression of the organization are trying to show that the problem concerns the failure to make progress in the democratic opening and that the government's indecisive attitude regarding the opening is the sole cause of what has happened. Those who oppose the opening, on the other hand, try to explain that the opening policies are responsible for this increase recorded in terror attacks. According to them, terror takes courage from the opening policies, and these attacks sufficiently show that the whole undertaking has ended in fiasco.

Yet the terror attacks we face have neither anything to do with the present state of the Kurdish question, nor is there in the organization that carries out the attack a will capable of encompassing the problems related to the subject. To put it more plainly, the PKK, which carries the message delivered to Turkey through these attacks, is not even aware of the content of the message it carries.

For if it is an organization as it is described to us, that is, if it has some kind of relationship of representation with the Kurdish people, then in the context we are in it has no business carrying out this attack. Because such attacks serve no purpose other than pushing the present government, which could be the sole addressee of all the problems it would want solved, to a point where it can produce no solutions in this process and cannot own any solution that is produced. In that case, either the PKK does not know what it is doing, or there is a great gulf between what it does and what it means.

This in fact constitutes sufficient reason for why the government should be wary of taking the PKK or İmralı as an interlocutor, secretly or openly.

The government is being driven toward the idea that taking Öcalan as an interlocutor is unavoidable, through the escalated attacks or the attacks said to be escalated further. Yet the address indicated for meeting the organization and Öcalan, whose strange alliances surface at every opportunity, has been arranged as a complete trap zone for the AK Parti. If it could trust his word, there would of course be no objection to the AK Parti going even to this address for the sake of stopping the bloodshed, but how is it to trust the organization or Öcalan, who have so far given no sign of trust or goodwill?

Everything done today by the armed or unarmed elements that run Kurdish politics amounts to nothing other than making it harder for the government to take steps toward a solution and sabotaging the steps taken. DTP co-chair Emine Ayna had told the cameras, laughing, as if giving good news, right at the start that the opening was over. Yet today, with the handcuffs placed on those arrested in the KKC operations and the arrest of the PKK militants who entered from Habur eight months ago, she also receives a more convenient support that will serve to hide this stance of theirs. This support shows what an interesting alliance against the opening is working with what kind of cosmic division of labor.

I wonder whether the judges who decided to arrest the PKK militants whom the government brought to Turkey by promising they would not be tried, taking a courageous initiative on the road to the opening, have increased Emine Ayna's joy or her sorrow?

Returning to the beginning, that is, to the question of to whom the message that the PKK carries with these attacks, and which definitely does not belong to itself, belongs...

We said earlier in this column that the recently increased activism of Turkey's foreign policy harbors some risks. The relations established within the framework of the policy that Ahmet Davutoğlu formulated as "zero problems with neighbors" brought Turkey's foreign policy to a point of activism and efficiency it has never had in its history. Setting aside that this activism has made Turkey a favored country on many grounds, it is also a fact that for many countries this position causes serious discomforts that are often left unexpressed. But the discomfort of some, and their expressing this discomfort by one means or another and creating difficulties for Turkey, constitutes no reason to turn back from this correct strategy. One who fears the crow does not sow millet.

While the increasing terror attacks today become thoroughly absurd in the context of the Kurdish question, they can acquire a real meaning only within this international context and, of course, within the context of Turkey's democratization.