The BDP's difficulties

It has become a habit to turn judgmental eyes on the BDP after every mistake the PKK makes. The Prime Minister invites the BDP members to put a distance between themselves and the PKK or terror, and says that if they do not, he will count them in the same category. In the media (even in our newspaper), harsh approaches are displayed holding the BDP members who cannot put a distance between themselves and the PKK directly responsible for PKK attacks.

If this identification of the PKK with the BDP stemmed simply from the BDP's not putting, or not being able to put, a distance between itself and the PKK, it would be considered very unfair. Yet this identification is not only about the BDP's shrinking from condemning the PKK when it commits terror; on the contrary, it is about its increasingly standing by the PKK even when it commits terror. Otherwise, for quite some time everyone had come to appreciate the following. The BDP will be finished the moment it positions itself against the PKK, because the base it relies on consists more or less of those who also sympathize with the PKK. Not only that, our problem is not only the Kurdish question but also the question of somehow persuading the PKK to come down from the mountain, and of establishing a dialogue with those on the mountain somehow and persuading them to come down on reasonable terms. If we care about doing this, intermediaries will be needed to establish this dialogue, and it was not seen as possible for anyone other than Öcalan and the BDP members to do it.

Truly, the expectation that those on the mountain have greatly missed their homes and feel a great desire to return home is only a wish. The conditions under which those who went up to the mountain went up, and how they turned war into a profession during the time they spent there, are a reality we must face. Unfortunately, during this period, instead of serving as a healthy bridge of communication with those on the mountain, on behalf of their future and their being brought back into society, the BDP played the role of a bridge for a faster trip to the mountain with their organization. In this respect, the BDP squandered all the roles it could have played in the process in a way that led the PKK to be seized by a false intoxication of superiority and power.

The PKK, which uses the legal possibilities of democracy through the BDP, also used this channel to recruit people for the mountain or for its urban structure. At the same time, it established a "military tutelage order" over Kurdish politics that nullifies both the BDP and Öcalan. Today, for this reason, Kurdish politics has become incapable of producing any solution under the tutelage of the PKK.

The BDP's condition is therefore even far worse than the position of Turkish politicians vis-à-vis the military in the eighties and nineties. For that reason it is quite tragic for the BDP members that, after every terror incident, they have no function left other than drawing upon themselves all of the anger directed at the PKK. Yet even this function is in the end a situation that the PKK can easily convert into political profit.

Civil society organizations in Diyarbakır have issued a declaration inviting the BDP back into politics. The visible way back to politics is to enter Parliament and to make a call to the PKK to stop the violence. Can the BDP do this?

In truth, in light of what we have described above, one has to accept that the BDP's situation is very difficult. They have no authority and no will. They have no authority to produce an alternative politics to the PKK's actions. Kandil has defined their sphere of authority, and they make not the slightest effort to step outside it. This lack of effort may be voluntary or involuntary; that is, they may be obeying the PKK knowingly or under compulsion. Of course we are in no position to look with understanding on what they do or do not do. In this process, if they had will, they could actually expand their own sphere of authority and produce a very beneficial politics. To do so, we understand, they do not need to set themselves directly against the PKK, but they can make reasonable moves that will at least prove their own existence to themselves and establish their self-respect. Instead of racking their brains over this, on every occasion they resort to threatening expressions that hint at an armed force behind them as a "guarantee."

They may even have reached the point where they cannot notice the style they have created with these expressions. They have internalized it so much that they have come to think this is normal. They see the state as the only actor for all solutions. They always want the state or the AKP to do something. They do not realize that by acting this way they both make the state and the AKP excessively powerful and cancel themselves out by shrinking from thinking about the contributions they could make to the process. Yet politics, by definition, begins not with the action of others but with your own action. Someone who always expects the whole solution from others counts for nothing at all. This is what we call the BDP's ontological problem.

Whatever happens, there is always a way for politics, but this way is not a road laid with carpets by others and waiting for you; it is a road opened by your own effort.