If the BDP cannot do even this…

A political party that cannot even demand the continuation of a peace climate that, for better or worse, is still holding is, in the most optimistic wording, helpless and useless. But, unfortunately, put more realistically, it makes that party responsible for every drop of blood that may flow from here on.

In our last column we mentioned that BDP members such as Aysel Tuğluk, Ahmet Türk, Selahattin Demirtaş and Gültan Kışanak had gathered in Diyarbakır and discussed the ceasefire declared by the PKK. At the end of the meeting these leading figures of the party issued a statement saying, "We do not find in ourselves the right to tell the PKK to continue the ceasefire or to maintain the ceasefire."

For years the relationship between the BDP (or its predecessor, the DTP) and the PKK has been accepted as a matter of feigning ignorance of what everyone knows. In response to the pressure on the BDP to accept the PKK as a "terrorist organization" and to "condemn" its actions from time to time, those who know the region, the organization and the sociology of the matter know that, since it shares the same base as the PKK, the BDP has no luxury of responding positively to this demand. It is clear that if it did so, it would be left with no capacity of representation in the region. For that reason, there is no justified side to putting this pressure on the BDP, and it would also reduce to zero the contributions the BDP might make to the peace process.

Of course, nobody can expect the BDP's relations with the PKK, or its stance toward the PKK's activities, to be like those of the AK Parti or the CHP. Yet the question of to what extent the BDP's relationship with an organization that openly carries out armed actions, or its attitude toward that organization's armed actions, can be tolerated is both an irritating and an entirely legitimate one. The BDP has no right to maintain an attitude that ignores this question as well.

In the latest incident, the BDP's relationship with the PKK has been revealed, like iodine on a wound, not as being aimed at resolving the ongoing problems but as an opportunism aimed at instrumentalizing the power of an armed organization as a political party and using it as a trump card. The BDP members are not saying that they cannot call for a halt to a war that is continuing. They are saying that they cannot ask for the silenced weapons not to be fired again. The difference between the two is very clear... This is, plainly, like the plain's armed-action instruction to the mountain... Faced with the image the BDP members have projected in recent days with their harsh statements, Kurtuluş Tayiz of the daily Taraf asks this justified question: "It is almost impossible to tell whether Kandil is more bellicose or those in the flat plain are more hawkish."

The BDP-PKK relationship has really taken a strange and complicated form. Until now the PKK's oppressive-armed tutelage could somehow serve as an excuse for the BDP's politics, whereas now the instrumentalization of that tutelage for day-to-day political interests has become more dominant.

At precisely this stage, when it has declared its own political powerlessness and its own uselessness so openly, it is not an incomprehensible attitude for BDP members to voice an impossible proposal such as "house arrest" for Öcalan, a proposal that, in Tayiz's phrase, "makes the impossible impossible." Frankly, such impossible and out-of-context demands show nothing other than that the BDP members have no intention of continuing the dialogue. Otherwise, one begins or continues a conversation with a comprehensible and thinkable proposition, doesn't one?

Unfortunately, there are serious signs that, with the elections at hand, the BDP members are calculating that the weapons will come back into play and that they will recoup somewhat the popularity they lost during the peace process.

What the BDP members cannot do is not merely tell the PKK to "continue the peace." They also say nothing about the death threats against the valuable Kurdish artists and thinkers Şiwan Perwer, Muhsin Kızılkaya and Mehmet Metiner.

Whether they cannot say it, or whether these threats occur because they do not say it, from here on will not matter that much. Those who cannot say, as a political party, that the weapons should not speak bear a clear responsibility for everything that happens, and no rhetoric can absolve them of this responsibility.