The "Kurdish Spring" against the PKK

The attacks the PKK launched after July 14 have no side that ultimately serves its own interests. As many have put it, the PKK is in effect committing a kind of suicide with these attacks. Because it squanders all the gains it had achieved so far in Turkey's general public opinion, and also damages its own position in the eyes of the state and politics, heading toward an unknown position.

Leaving aside its standing before Turkish public opinion and the state, with these latest attacks the PKK is sinking into a very serious legitimacy problem even among its own target audience. For the first time in the region it is being criticized this loudly, and is even exposed to an outright popular uprising. The PKK, which has been trying to establish an identification with the Arab Spring through the actions it has been trying to escalate since the Arab Spring began, while aiming to set a Turkish Spring in motion, has through these very actions come to face a Kurdish Spring itself.

In Siirt, Diyarbakır and Batman, broad masses of people voice their revolt without fearing all this ruthless, lawless, merciless potential of the PKK. The PKK members who staged an action in Batman, in the place known as the one where they feel strongest, far from being supported and sheltered by the people, are being reported by the people.

The expected revolt of the Kurdish people is taking place not against the state but against the PKK.

The internet, the symbolic arena of struggle of the Arab Spring, is also these days the scene of a revolt by Kurdish youth. Kurdish youths, organized over Facebook and sensitive to the Kurdish issue as well, cry out their revolt against the PKK with the words "do not die for me, do not kill." Moreover, this revolt by no means endorses the policies of denial, assimilation and annihilation that the state applied until recently. On the contrary, even while criticizing that stance, it opposes the PKK by putting a distance of conscience between itself and the path the PKK has adopted for the solution of the Kurdish issue.

Could the PKK not calculate that, by escalating the war so violently just when it had reached the stage of negotiation with the state, it would lose its own base?

According to one account, all these attacks are taking place within the framework of a strategic plan. The PKK concealed its real intention even in its talks with the state, and used even those talks to stall the state and used the inactivity it gained in the meantime to fortify its own war positions. It also used its talks with the state as a means of gathering intelligence on the state's plans. That is, while meeting with MİT, the aim was not a solution but gathering intelligence on the state's intentions.

If this view is correct, then within the PKK's strategic plan the massacre of civilians, of children in their mothers' wombs, and of women with such ruthlessness is not an accident either, and can only be understood within this plan. In this way the PKK has in fact tried to persuade its own target audience to submit to it by proving how ruthless it is.

Violence is, unfortunately, a valid method of propaganda. Some people are attached out of sympathy, while others are "convinced" out of fear. Publications that try to show what a boundless, ruthless, savage organization of murder the PKK is are also, in reverse, working for the organization that believes in the effectiveness of this method of propaganda.

There is no doubt that the organization believes in such a method of propaganda and has been applying it for quite some time. Here the target is not only the segments coded as the enemy. On the contrary, its own target audience also gets its share of this ruthlessness. On the other hand, this propaganda shows that it has no respect whatsoever for its own target audience, that is, for the segments it claims to be trying to save. This is the greatest insult that an organization claiming to save the Kurds can offer the Kurds. An empire founded by frightening has no honor whatsoever, and persuasion by means of violence is condemning a people to dishonor.

As a result, the Kurdish issue has in fact only just begun. The Kurdish people do not deserve to be humiliated this much. This is why the mother of the family of Evin, a Kurd from Siirt, cried out, "After you slaughtered my two daughters, what would I do with a Kurdish state!"

To anyone who demands something while disregarding human dignity, life, the feelings of mothers, morality, law and humanity this much, whatever it demands is not given. Especially if what it wants is to rule over the people it wants, autonomy or state power, then what they do is precisely the best indicator of why this right cannot be given to them.

To recognize and accept the Kurdish issue fully within a democratic framework is a right. But to re-evaluate the PKK's demands within this moral framework is a separate human obligation. The Kurdish people cannot be abandoned to the mercy of a PKK that considers even proving its ruthlessness an accomplishment. The cries of the Kurdish people that are being heard show that the PKK's calculation on this point does not add up either.