What is forbidden to Turks is forbidden to Kurds too

Hayrettin Karaman Hodja's article titled "The road leading to division must be closed" has, as might be expected, started an important debate from the very beginning. We say "as might be expected" because it is not easy to build a new discourse with concepts shared in a debate that was started beforehand in the midst of the political discourse we are in. Once concepts are used, regardless of what is meant, they go and stick to one side like a magnet. Concepts such as "division, discord, falling into disagreement" inevitably stick, in the context of the debate we are in, to the side whose pole is the "unitary-nationalist-state."

Yet the conditions of this polarity may have changed, or the way to change those conditions may lie precisely in changing the load those concepts carry. This has come about either because objective political conditions have changed, or thanks to the entry onto the stage of a new will and discourse aspiring to change those conditions. It is not possible to say that the unitary-totalitarian statist discourse that brought the Kurdish question to the present day continues today in its old form, and there is also a strong will that it will not continue in its old form from now on. Undoubtedly, the de facto intervention in the course of events by the Islamic circles, of which Karaman Hodja is also a part, has a significant share in this.

To immediately position Karaman Hodja alongside a unitary-nationalist statist ideological stance because of his articles "The road leading to division must be closed" and, following it, "Discord cannot be defended" is, first of all, a great injustice. The Hodja is a jurist, and although he speaks of closing a road (the road leading to division), he is in fact in no position to close any road. He has no more of a blocking effect than the liberal-authoritarianism that his critics display in trying to block the way to his advice. Just look: even with what he has said, far from closing a debate, he has opened it to the fullest.

And yet the Hodja, to repeat, is, as everyone knows, a jurist. In this capacity he warns only those Kurdish or Turkish Muslims who will take him into account and attribute special value to what he says, about a matter he sees. He points to the existence of an Islamist approach to the solution of the Kurdish question that goes beyond both Turkish and Kurdish nationalism. He advises the Kurds not to veer onto a road onto which the Turks earlier veered, and which, because of veering onto it, has brought nothing but disaster both to themselves and to other peoples. Truly, whoever has veered onto that road has so far gone nowhere but to a fiery abyss. Turks, Arabs and Albanians all veered onto that road and prepared their own disasters, and have still not been able to recover from that disaster.

What Mehmet Akif Ersoy said to the Albanians in the past, how he grieved and was saddened for them, should be understood in the same way: that today a scholar in Karaman's position says the same things to the Kurds, or to any other ethnic Muslim element inclined to break away from the whole out of a nationalist feeling, and is seized by the same sorrow over the disaster he feels for them.

Moreover, now that we have boundless experience of what quagmire both the Arabs and the Albanians sank into at the end of those adventures, no one has the right to say, "Let the Kurds sink into the same quagmire too." No Muslim people deserves an inhuman, Baath-style regime. It is impossible to say, "Let the Kurds too enjoy their independence for a while under a Baath-style regime that strips human beings of their humanity." There is no question of the one who says this, or of the one who stays silent when it is said, wanting the good of the Kurds, but still, there are those who say it. No one can cut this debate short.

When it is Karaman Hodja who wants the Kurds not to be swept into Kurdish nationalism, this surely does not mean asking them to acquiesce in, or stay silent about, the policies of denial, annihilation and assimilation to which they have been subjected until now under unitary statist Turkish nationalism. What is forbidden to the Kurds is forbidden to the Turks too. If Kurdish nationalism or separatism is forbidden, the Hodja surely does not hold back from saying that it is forbidden to the Turks as well.

Moreover, to subject the Hodja immediately to an examination of merit and competence over his past because of a truth he has spoken is both inappropriate and a new style of plugging one's ears. For a person to be able to speak one truth, he need not have known and spoken all truths in the past.

In fact, the Hodja continues to express himself, to explain and clarify what he has said, and to answer the criticisms or questions directed at him because of what he has written. Among what he has written so far, from his first article onward, I have seen no sign that he is speaking on behalf of a state that denied and annihilated the Kurds and persecuted the Kurds, the devout and its other citizens in the name of that so-called "unitary" identity. Still, I must say that I find the offer of "arbitration" that Altan Tan made to him very interesting and useful, and that I look forward with interest to the continuation of the answer he has been writing for the past two days in response to his questions.