On the horizon of the point of no return

Only a month ago, we were on the horizon of a comprehensive solution to the Kurdish question that would include the PKK and Öcalan, and even the goodwill acceptance of Turkey's general public. An optimism that the possibilities of words could be used to the very end appeared to prevail. This optimistic atmosphere was not without its irritations, because the PKK presented its inaction as a favor bestowed at great sacrifice, and because of its threatening rhetoric, repeatedly voiced, about ending this inaction. From an environment in which the Kurdish question had almost been settled and even house arrest, let alone treating him as an interlocutor, could be considered for Öcalan, within a month we were hurled into an environment where words had no force left at all.

Truly, this optimistic environment was proceeding very fragilely because of the PKK's excessively coy attitudes, which had by now become a caprice.

Meanwhile the BDP gradually began not to shrink from using the possibility of PKK action as an element of threat against society, the state and the government. Let alone putting a distance between itself and the PKK, it increasingly took on open spokesmanship for the PKK as if doing something normal. It gave the government impossible deadlines for the immediate fulfillment of its impossible demands.

Faced with this style of politics, society's situation began to resemble that in thrillers. You know, where everyone tries to fulfill the impossible demands of the villain who holds hostages or threatens to detonate time bombs planted somewhere. In fact, in Turkey both the government and society were in a state of gradually putting up even with these threatening discourses. Society became almost ready to look with understanding even on the attitudes of the Kurdish politicians, which were turning into caprice and pushing the limits of tolerance. So long as there was no return to the old days, no new war, no bloodshed.

Even a BDP woman deputy's portrayal of a female militant who had martyred 8 soldiers through a suicide-bomber attack as a freedom hero of the Kurdish people was ignored. Even the effort to drag Turkey, with premeditation, into a tension prepared in advance, by nominating Hatip Dicle when it was known he could not become a deputy, was in the end accepted as the BDP wanted it to be understood, as an innocent grievance of representation. Dicle's words, which led to his conviction and which sanctified the PKK's murders "as the right of self-defense," were accepted as innocent freedom of expression. Dicle's words and the words that had been used in the past as grounds for Prime Minister Erdoğan's conviction were put in the same category. This equation was not much objected to, as if caprice would do, although it was an unjust comparison from beginning to end...

In the end, the high credit given to peace in society was beginning to open the horizon of a solution. The PKK, with all its caprices, had no excuse left for restarting the process of action. The state has carried out its own self-criticism and in line with that criticism has revised the structure that gave rise to both the Kurdish question and the problem of violence. Policies of assimilation, annihilation and denial have been confessed, self-criticism has been made of them, and a promise has been given that everything will be set right. A new, civilian constitution in which all these problems are seen is already on the agenda as society's primary subject.

Kurdish politics, armed and unarmed, instead of contributing to this agenda, is busy sabotaging the process with its caprices. But with its latest attacks, beginning in Silvan and continuing in Çukurca, the PKK has no story it could tell the public even as a pretext. With these actions it has raised the state's violence against itself to the most legitimate and justified position it could have.

Very different assessments can be made about why the PKK is so eager for war. Viewed from the standpoint of Turkey's domestic politics, that is, the relations between the PKK and the state or government, making sense of the PKK's relapse into violence is not easy by the measures of reason. For that reason, assessments concerning international relations may be attractive for fitting what is unreasonable into a mind. Yet the PKK's reflexes for preserving its own existence as an organization and its anxiety about the future put forth a quite greedy though comprehensible will, even if based on wrong calculations.

The first thing we must now understand is the fact that the PKK no longer has any connection to the Kurdish question. The fact that the Kurdish question has genuinely entered the path of resolution on the ground of politics has left the PKK face to face with a real problem of ontology. The PKK is focused on the question of what will become of the organization in a political environment in which the Kurdish question has been solved. The democratic autonomy debates are therefore not about the Kurds' autonomy but only about the survival of the PKK's organizational existence and, of course, its being rewarded. For that reason it cannot accept the fact that the solution of the Kurdish question at the same time requires the evacuation and liquidation of the PKK, and it embarks on a somewhat arduous, toilsome and even impossible path against this fact. This path may perhaps not seem impossible to it. Truly, its calculation rests on the mistaken perception that state violence, which has been suspended for quite some time simply because of the government's approach to the subject, has been completely bought off. It knows that the language of violence has gained it a great deal until now, and wants a new round. Meanwhile it is still unaware that the state has changed, and evidently misinterprets the tolerance directed toward it until now. Unfortunately, we shall all pay together the bill for this misinterpretation of its.