Treating the Kurdish question with a "closure" approach

One of the most tragic outcomes of wars is that people quickly begin to resemble the enemies they fight. Of course it does not always have to be so. Moreover, if this enemy you resemble changes itself as you come to resemble it, and years later you reach its former state, a far more tragic situation arises.

The tutelage that the PKK, which has turned the Kurdish question into its own property and closed it off, is trying to establish over its own people has in every respect caught the language of the Kemalist nationalism it fights. By converting its holding of weapons, through an argument of "paying a price" for its own people, into the right to be the only voice on behalf of the Kurds, it is trying to fortify an organizational tutelage over Kurdish politics in its heaviest form.

The interesting part is that the Turkish state it imitates in this form is no longer such a state.

In recent days we witnessed Diyarbakır Mayor Osman Baydemir being harshly scolded by Öcalan because of his assessment, within a framework that does not even deviate much from the PKK's current official discourse, that the armed struggle has outlived its time. Baydemir himself received this scolding respectfully and without objection as Öcalan's "right to criticize." We, too, in this column, took up one of the most important problems of the Kurdish question, both today and in the near future, in an article titled "The Problem of the Kurdish Politician."

Today the state, as the most inflexible, most stubborn, my-way-or-the-highway party that gave rise to the Kurdish question, has been astonishingly flexible on this subject, has opened itself to every kind of criticism, has lost every trace of its old stubbornness, and, if it has not entirely ceased to be a part of the Kurdish question, has given signs that it can. Yet another problem, which has become fully apparent with the Baydemir example and which everyone who does politics or struggles for existence in the region feels to the marrow, is the problem of armed organization tutelage over Kurdish politics. The Kurdish politician, who does not hesitate to make the harshest criticisms against the state, cannot put forward any alternative view against the PKK, which has declared a monopoly on determining the whole framework of the Kurdish question. No good comes of any solution whose framework is drawn by the threatening authoritarianism of armed force; only fear and terror come.

One of those who have long been subjected to the PKK's threats is Orhan Miroğlu.

The Constitutional Court banned Miroğlu, known for the most moderate and most solution-oriented views in the closed DTP, from politics together with Ahmet Türk and Aysel Tuğluk, two other most reasonable party members. Miroğlu, a thoroughly wise man whose life has been devoted to the struggle around the Kurdish question and to the most reasonable solution of this question, with priceless experience accumulated from what he has lived, always deserves to be listened to carefully, not only on the Kurdish question but on what he says about Turkish politics and democracy in general. Naturally, he is also someone with different and horizon-opening views that will open Turkey's path on the Kurdish question.

Frankly, non-Kurds who listen to Miroğlu are very likely to approach the Kurdish issue with a little more empathy and to come much closer to facing the problem. Yet it is not possible for a politician who has not ruled out violence to stir the slightest sympathy or empathy toward the solution of the Kurdish problem. People like Miroğlu are a real stroke of luck for Kurds who want to keep their identity and culture at a high-quality level. But it is very easy for them to become the target of those who see the problem as a "closed field" for themselves and of their own, and who have nothing to rely on other than their weapons.

Today Miroğlu has become the target of the armed forces who, by treating Kurdish politics and the Kurdish nation entirely as a closed field, are trying to sustain a jealous monopoly over the problem.

What he has said about Kurdish politics has angered these forces; he had received threats before, but he insisted on speaking. Most recently, on the official website of the HPG, the PKK's armed wing, he has been threatened with the words that what he said would make him a "mortoğlu" and that if he continues this stubbornness "a line drawn with a red pencil will come into play!"

As Ahmet Altan notes in his excellent article on the subject, setting aside that trying to silence people in this way, relying on one's weapon, is despicable, it is, unfortunately, another fact that this despicability has at the moment badly intimidated Kurdish politicians.

At first, truth be told, even I found the demand that the Kurdish politician put distance between himself and the PKK excessive and unnecessary. Because after all, the PKK, however it came about, did not appear to the people of the region as it appears from Ankara or İzmir, and a politician who called the PKK terrorist would be left without a political ground.

Yet today, a ground on which the treacherous weapon that threatens Miroğlu or Baydemir and intimidates other Kurdish politicians is not condemned represents no value either to Kurds or to humanity.

We regard the interference of those holding weapons in politics as a threat to Turkish democracy, so why should we have to see it as normal for Kurdish politics?