The return (or transformation?) of politics in the Kurdish question?

It would be more accurate to take what has recently been experienced in the Kurdish question, which has been closed to politics since the founding of the Turkish Republic, within the dilemma of "the return or transformation of politics." It is a fact that in debates carried on entirely in the shadow of weapons over the last thirty years, hardly any room was left for the political sphere. The movements in this matter have come about not through the conclusion of debates on the subject or bringing them to a certain point, but entirely through security or self-defense reflexes. However, we can say that in the last few years the subject has been opened to politics, at first in some aspects and then increasingly in all aspects.

With Öcalan's decision for non-conflict, the process of politicization of the field, which the government had begun earlier, found an important ground for development. Many things we hear or will hear during the politicization process may seem very surprising, frightening, even worrying, but we must not forget that this experience of politicization is in any case a process that has been substituting for realities such as war, blood, weapons, hatred and death for years, and such a discursive price for this transition seems unavoidable. For politics to be able to substitute for violence directed against politics, it is essential that the parties get used to new experiences of speaking.

The Democratic Autonomy Workshop that the Democratic Society Congress held in Diyarbakır over the weekend shows that the space the state has opened to politics on the Kurdish question, having cleansed it somewhat of militarism, has in a sense begun to work. At the meeting, to which many journalists, writers and academics who are in some way concerned with the Kurdish question, generally favorable but also known for their critical attitudes toward the armed tutelage over Kurdish politics, were invited, what the DTK understands by democratic autonomy was listened to, discussed in all its dimensions and, where necessary, criticized in the harshest terms. The BDP or DTK representatives listened to these criticisms to the end and gave answers from their own perspective. But in this way precisely what should happen in the political sphere happened, and in my opinion an important dialogue and debate took place.

Voicing and defending the demand for democratic autonomy as a demand is a democratic right, and nothing can be more natural than a political party or movement defending it provided it stays within political and democratic limits. Of course, we do not forget that this natural thing is contrary to our democratic habits so far. Especially that the word "federation" it evokes is regarded as directly synonymous with "division"...

Yet an attitude such as the unilateral declaration of democratic autonomy is not democratic at all. Moreover, perhaps the only thing incompatible with declaring this autonomy from an organization's center, dimensioning its content with details of its own, is democracy.

The BDP members want the city councils, communes, and neighborhood and village organizations that they are trying to implement in the Southeast to be viewed as examples of "the people's self-organization" and of direct democracy. Yet when one looks closely at these examples, what is clearly seen is nothing other than the rule over the people by a thoroughly professionalized organization with arms in hand, rather than the people's self-organization. How this form of administration, which replaces a state that has to some degree become democratized today with an authority-hungry organization, turns into a totalitarian interim regime over the people is another reality.

Meanwhile, no convincing argument can be put forward even in the region as to whom the self-defense units, which they have raised as part of the democratic autonomy project, will defend against whom. Galip Ensarioğlu rightly warns that these units will produce no result other than the armed domination of the Kurd over Kurds, let alone concern over separation.

Different tendencies stand out in the approach to the process of those who have taken up Kurdish politics. Some are aware that the state's change in the direction of democratization played an important role in the development of the process in this way. But it is seen that some believe the softening in the state or the recognition of the Kurd was achieved thanks to the armed struggle. With a feeling of having won a victory against the state, they seem to be declaring an action plan rather than debating their demands. In the meantime they are in fact being drawn to a point that rejects politics as a negotiation. What they probably do not take into account is that the state, which has today come to the point of "recognizing the Kurd" and increasingly of "seeing all their demands," has come to this point not by force of arms but through law and politics. It follows that they still do not understand that the state, which has grown used for thirty years to speaking with weapons, will never tire of dying and killing.

Yet even today there is still a state stratum that wholeheartedly desires the armed conflict to resume and does not hold back from hatching a thousand and one kinds of intrigues for this purpose when necessary, and this stratum sees war as a necessity for its own vitality. So no one has the right to fall into the error of perceiving peace as a victory in the name of Kurdish politics. One must never forget that, especially in the case of Turkey and in the context of the Kurdish question, war is seen by some as a "profitable field of investment."

In that case, who other than those who have a calculation of taking a share of this profit could insist on keeping this field open?