To whose existence will the existence of the Kurd be a gift?

There may be different views on the diagnosis and resolution of the Kurdish issue. Yet, as we noted before, Kurdish nationalists are trying to establish a monopoly over the diagnosis of this problem and to brand anything different from their own proposals as entirely remote from a solution, as stalling, as another tactic of assimilation, and so on.

Yet the line represented today by the BDP/PKK brings the Kurds nothing but a catastrophe, not a solution. It pushes the Kurds into the very same vise in which all racists and nationalists before them were caught, indeed a worse one. Worse because an additional dimension of anachronism, born of belatedness, is added to the matter. This makes the nationalism put forward in the name of the Kurds truly far more ridiculous. It is the story of that historical repetition in which what was drama the first time takes place as tragicomedy the second...

In essence, from this enterprise only an elitist clique leading it comes out profiting. They, thanks to the struggle they wage, are calculating to "raise the consciousness" of the people, so to speak, and indeed to lull the people with their nationalist fairy tales and make them their subjects. Among them there are surely also those who sincerely believe in Kurdish nationalism; perhaps they, as in all nationalisms, may not be taking such a calculating approach. But those who come to the fore as the real claimants to the business want a people to govern.

They are trying again the technically proven, seemingly guaranteed way of creating this people. Just as all earlier nationalist adventures did, the Kurdish people too will have presented their very existence as a gift to the existence of this elitist stratum. God forbid, once they succeed, no Kurd will any longer have the chance of not presenting his existence as a gift to them. Frankly, in this way a new form of servitude to fellow human beings is realized through the Kurds. The assimilation of the Kurds is in fact realized in that way. Perhaps on the surface a new identity is shaped on the basis of Kurdishness, but the price of the elevated Kurdish identity is nothing other than a new nationalist and secularist culture. Besides, nationalist identities have no other kind of end.

Yet for the Kurds the problem is not that they lack a national identity or existence, but the approaches of the country in which they live that disregard them, deny their existence, and assimilate them in the name of another national identity. If this itself is wrong, the solution to the problem is not the repetition of another wrong for the sake of the Kurds or other components, but the correction of that country's definition of identity in such a way that it will not offend the Kurds or any other component. What needs to be done is entirely this correction, a solution that will develop Kurds, Turks and all other components alike within a framework of mutual respect and law. It is normal that such a solution does not satisfy those segments that set out with the aim of constructing Kurdishness as a nation. Because in this solution it is not possible for the Kurds to be set aside as a political yield.

The insistence of Kurdish nationalists on violence as a tool for obtaining this yield does not stem from the impossibility of obtaining gains from the state through politics; rather, it stems from the impossibility of persuading the Kurds of this project through politics. Violence, if a classification must be made, causes the deaths of Kurds rather than Turks, and these deaths serve to persuade the Kurds rather than the state. In the course of the process, every Kurd who dies, whether at the hands of the state or of the organization, becomes no small material in this effort of persuasion.