Why did we live this tension?

That the Supreme Election Board (YSK) backed down three days after its scandalous decision that threw the country's agenda into turmoil was of course very good, but it also lodged this ominous question in all our minds: Why did we go through these events?

BDP Chairman Selahattin Demirtaş said, after the YSK reversed its erroneous decision, "none of this had to happen," and he was right. But let us also put on record that they themselves bore a share of responsibility for all this that was no less than the YSK's.

The document the Supreme Election Board demanded from candidates, the "certificate on the restoration of prohibited rights," which had to be obtained from the courts, is in fact a document that should never have been requested at all, owing to the latest amendments in the CMUK and the TCK. Instead of this document, the YSK could have decided for itself and produced the provision this document contains. As its name says, it is the "Supreme Election Board," a constitutional body and a high judicial organ, that is, a high court. A court of this stature could have produced, on its own, the information it requested from the local courts, even on the basis of the documents submitted by the applicants. After all, the new regulations in the Law on Criminal Records, to the effect that the prohibited rights of those who have served their sentences are automatically restored, leave no need even for such a document, and in fact the documents requested from the local courts are documents with no validity. That the YSK was doing this without knowing it must be a separate problem, and a quite distinct and very big one. Could there have been a decision so lacking in foresight about the possible political and sociological spheres of impact of the matter on which it was ruling?

Unfortunately, that the YSK made its decision so lacking in foresight is still the most optimistic view. It was not possible that it did not know the meaning and consequences of the decision it gave. As a result of this decision, which gives the impression of being the product of very fine workmanship, a picture of chaos was produced in the country ahead of the elections.

When the election campaign began in earnest, one of the greatest concerns was that the PKK would return to the field of action, whether on its own initiative or through the launching of operations by the TSK. In either case, all the scenes and lines of the play being performed had been memorized in advance, and no one would have left any room for doubt about by whom and for what purpose such a process had been put back on stage. That play therefore no longer had any profitability, but this did not mean that new and creative plays could not be staged over the same problem.

That the BDP members threw themselves at the YSK's decision like an invitation to the streets and to violence showed that the actors of this play had not changed at all. The BDP leader, who reacted from the very first minute by blaming the AKP for the YSK's decision, saying "this decision will have grave consequences," became, with the invitation he issued to violence in the streets, unfortunately the complementary actor of the play to which the YSK decision belonged.

The link drawn between the YSK decision and the AK Party is above all a simple propaganda aimed at deceiving, by treating one's own constituency as ignorant. The Kurdish people really do not deserve to be deceived so simply.

It can of course not be said that the AK Party has taken all the necessary steps on democratization, but the BDP members preferred, even in some of the steps that were taken, to cooperate with those who showed the fiercest opposition. Moreover, all the regulations (the TCK, the CMUK and the Law on Criminal Records) that would make such a decision of the YSK be regarded as a scandal, and thereby force it to abandon this decision, were made possible by the improvements carried out in this period.

By saying that nothing had been done in this period, the BDP preferred to direct the anger caused by the YSK decision at AK Party members, who were themselves also targets of the YSK.

The ten percent threshold is of course not a democratic practice and must be corrected, there is no doubt about that. But the claim that its sole target is Kurdish politics is a complete distortion. At present the MHP, as the focus of Turkist politics, is probably the most important target of this threshold. There is a possibility that the MHP will fail to pass the threshold, and in that case, as against a BDP that has managed to bring close to 30 deputies into parliament with 6 percent, there is also the possibility that an MHP that has received close to 10 percent of the vote will not be able to send any deputies at all. The grievance of the threshold had earlier befallen the MHP, ANAP, the CHP and again the MHP. To draw a discourse of grievance directed at the Kurds from this, to provoke anger further, and especially to carry this anger into an environment of violence with deaths at the end of it, reduces the politics pursued by the BDP to the level of dirty gain.

The finest word to appeal to the conscience of those immersed in these calculations was spoken by my dear Melih Altınok of the newspaper Taraf: "When it is a child's life that is at stake, even a hundred deputies you would bring into Parliament are a detail."