The Kurds owe the PKK nothing

We said that Kurdish nationalists insist on resorting to violence as a tool for turning the Kurds into a nation subordinate to themselves. For, setting aside whether it is possible to win gains from the state through politics, it appears impossible for them to persuade the Kurds themselves of this project through politics.

Being persuaded of a common national identity is not as easy as is assumed. A national identity is a boundary that separates from many others just as much as it brings some people together. It makes you kin to some, but an enemy or a stranger to many more. To understand this, it is more than enough to look at how the boundaries that Turkish nationalism wove around itself through this identity functioned as a prison for 80 years.

That is why, even if a portion of the Kurds can be persuaded by this kind of nationalist identity, the overwhelming majority will not embrace being hostile or alien to others purely on the basis of race. For although the nationalist identity appeals to nationalist feelings, it is a closing and world-estranging identity, and it is never possible for it to gather under its roof, with their consent, all the groups it lays claim to. It is especially impossible for Kurds who hold Islamic values to adopt this nationalist identity in the way the nationalists want.

Since persuading the Kurds to become a nation on the terrain of politics is thus impossible, violence remains the only persuasive path for Kurdish nationalists. To repeat, the target of the violence that proceeds from this need is not to persuade the state but to persuade the Kurds. Indeed, if a classification must be made at all, this violence causes the deaths of Kurds rather than Turks. In the course of the process, the life of every Kurd who dies, whether at the hands of the state or of the organization, becomes no small material in this effort of persuasion. Ultimately, far from saving the Kurds from the state's tyranny, the PKK hopes to gather them around itself on a ground that makes them resign themselves to malaria.

Even so, this kind of effort at persuasion has its limits. Through this politics of death, the people do not act as much as the organization wishes, at the timing it wishes, and put forth a nationalist will. For the people increasingly see that the movement that claims to save them offers them nothing but death, and that ultimately it cannot offer anything that could be deemed worth these deaths.

The elitist-nationalist movement that tries to present itself to the Kurds as a savior tries to present all the recent improvements made for the Kurds as its own success, its own gain, the result of its own struggle. It also presents all of the AK Parti's improvements, which stem from its own approach to the Kurdish issue, as the AK Parti's compulsion. Thus the AK Parti is presented as a party that has taken on defeat on behalf of the traditional state and been forced to give the Kurds their rights.

That the organization tries to present it this way is actually understandable; it is a path profitable in its own way for showing its own existence and effectiveness more and for showing that it is owed more by the Kurds. But this story has nothing whatsoever to do with reality. The PKK, with its armed struggle, could not push back the classical conception of the state by a millimeter, and it never could have. Because for that conception of the state it was of no importance at all for people to die in this or that number. After all, it was mostly Kurds who were dying, and in any case the soldiers who died kept reproducing and feeding Turkish nationalism, and therefore their own power, through martyrs' ceremonies. The political profit produced by that war mechanism was not something that could be easily relinquished. Truly, from this political profit, this illicit gain, the PKK too took more than its share.

Only an outside actor could halt this mechanism, which operated at the price of the constant death of its own people. It was granted only to the AK Parti to put an end to this dirty war that cost both the Kurds and the Turks dearly. The recognition that one dimension of the problem concerns the Kurdish issue is not something the AK Parti has only just woken up to, nor is it at all a conclusion it reached thanks to the PKK's violence. The Kurdish issue was included in the party program already when the AK Parti was being founded, and the program stated that it was a problem that had to be resolved before security-centered policies. Moreover, within this framework the program stated that all measures would be taken for the Kurdish language and culture to live and be kept alive, including Kurdish broadcasting. That is, it is not the case that the AK Parti opened TRT Şeş or opened room for Kurdish-language education as a concession each time the PKK carried out armed action.

Moreover, when the AK Parti wrote all this into its program, it was under the threat of being shut down by the system, and was therefore also anxious to prove its legitimacy. To the legitimacy problem it suffered because of secularism was added its approach to the Kurdish question. Despite this, this was the AK Parti's approach to the matter, and what convinced it of this approach was not the PKK's violence but, on the contrary, only the values it takes as its reference.

Strangely enough, the most important obstacle before the AK Parti, which sought to give the Kurds their rights on the basis of these values, was always the PKK. For the AK Parti both looked properly at the Kurdish issue entirely with reference to its own values and displayed the will to resolve it, and also showed that the persuasiveness of violence in the struggle for rights was merely a huge superstition. This was a move that rendered void the price of tutelage that the PKK tried to make the Kurds pay. The plain truth that emerges in the end is this: the PKK's acts of violence did not secure the granting of the Kurds' rights; on the contrary, they delayed the granting of the Kurds' rights and made the Kurds' situation worse in every respect.

More plainly, given the rights already recognized by the AK Parti, in a way stemming from the AK Parti's own political understanding, the PKK has no claim on the Kurds. While the Kurds want neither to die nor to kill for themselves, there is no place for the PKK to establish an armed tutelage over the Kurds merely by displaying its skill at killing. On the contrary, because it has been an obstacle to the granting of the Kurds' rights, has delayed developments, and has moreover constantly added intrigue, blood and deceit to the matter, it owes the Kurds a heavy apology.