The PKK wants the Kurdish people from the state

Today we need to correctly understand the change that has been experienced, and is being experienced, in the area of the Kurdish question. Nothing could be more natural than the Kurdish political movement having a demand and this creating pressure on the state. But this pressure merely having produced results and realized the transformation does not help us understand the change that has taken place.

As we have noted before, it is not possible for the PKK's violence to have led to any gain for Kurds, because this violence, on the contrary, had the effect of further reinforcing the nationalist steel core of the country. The state was not operating on the basis of a rationality that considered the benefit of all its people and aimed at becoming strong with all its people. On the contrary, it was a structure looking after the interests of a narrow oligarchic structure, precisely in the sense depicted by Marx.

In such a system the multitude of enemies did not have the effect of changing or correcting the state according to the enemy's wishes; on the contrary, it had the effect of increasing the state's resistance and exalting it further in the eyes of a minority that was the basis of legitimacy. Moreover, PKK violence was never an element that could push back state resistance. On the contrary, the violence of the two sides fed each other. Both sides were fed by the dirty war in between. That is why the PKK's violence did not constitute a threat to this state mentality.

The state that today, through the AK Parti, has begun listening to its citizen, has aimed to end violence in this way, and for that has aimed to understand the grievance even of terrorists who bear arms if necessary, does not show that the old state has come to its senses. On the contrary, it shows only that the state has changed.

Therefore the Kurdish movement needs to understand the following clearly. The change being experienced today, the improvement in the rights of Kurds, we can attribute to the horizons of the mental codes of the cadres in power, which diminish this problem. The steps such as the right to defense in the mother tongue and TRT Şeş can never be attributed to a gain the PKK achieved through violence. Among parties accustomed to seeing war as a reason for their existence, an element outside the war needed to step in to halt the course of events.

When the AK Parti, as a party outside this system, tried to stop the fixed wars of the two sides, both of their guns turned toward the AK Parti.

The deep state and the PKK, as two forces that, it turned out, were quite content to fight each other, fought in alliance against this force that disrupted their peace and their rigged operations, but this alliance too can no longer maintain its former strength. It is losing power by being exposed in many places. All the instruments they could use are slipping from their hands one by one. Meanwhile, while fighting many times over against the PKK, the AK Parti is returning to Kurds the cultural rights they deserve. It is easy for it, and in fact only for it, to do this, because it has no ideological fixation on this matter; on the contrary, the AK Parti's values require taking these steps.

Indeed, the promises on mother-tongue education, recognition of the Kurdish language and removal of obstacles to radio and television broadcasting are topics that were in its program when the AK Parti was founded. Therefore the PKK's saying that it made them do this by force is entirely false propaganda. Whatever the AK Parti does for Kurds, it does as a requirement of its horizon of human rights and its value structure, and moreover does it in spite of the PKK and the BDP.

There are many reasons to think that those of the BDP or PKK have fallen into an anxiety about their existence because of the openings made by the AK Parti. Neither the BDP nor the PKK wants to see the fact that the AK Parti, motivated by its own values, can do something for Kurds. Because this is something that removes the raison d'etre of both. Because the story they want to rest upon, the story that brought them into being, is a state that continually oppresses Kurds, denies them and tries to assimilate them, and the fact that today that state is working through the AK Parti.

Yet today neither that state is present, nor is the AK Parti itself, which brought about the change of that state and thereby ended the policies of denial and assimilation. The AK Parti has officially changed the state whose oppression Kurds really did suffer for 80 years.

The state is not an unchanging, fixed, metaphysical essence. It too changes, and indeed through the AK Parti the assimilationist, denialist state has given way to a conception of the state that sees all its citizens as equal, sees its citizens' cultural differences as a richness, guarantees and protects everyone's human rights and freedoms, and exists for its citizen and by its citizen. This state is undoubtedly an ideal not yet perhaps fully completed, but the horizon of this ideal has come into view.

In the end the PKK is trying to keep alive the story that the demands of Kurds have not been met. It tries to present what has been done as not done, or as a continuation of the traditional assimilationist state strategies. That is why it tries either to belittle even the demands that have been met or to present them as a success, a gain, of its own armed struggle. By doing this it is trying to secure not the Kurds but its own organizational gains.

In fact, what the PKK demands in this way, as I said, is not rights and freedoms for Kurds, but that the governance of Kurds be left to itself. With the violence it applies it tries to convince Kurds of its power and thinks that this has so far been a successful path. But since, despite everything, it has not convinced Kurds enough, since still 80 percent of Kurds are not convinced, PKK violence at the same time turns into a demand that the state abandon the Kurdish people to it as subjects.

Although the Kurdish people have no heart for it, the PKK wants the Kurdish people from the state. In fact, the PKK does not let Kurds exercise the rights the state has given them anyway. Because in the PKK's conception of the Kurdish people there is no Kurd who can decide on his own. There is a conception of a Kurdish people who have transferred their authority to decide on their own behalf to the PKK.

The state has no obligation to hand Kurds over to the PKK, and cannot be accused of not having solved the Kurds' problem because it did not hand them over. What needs to be done from now on is for Kurdish politicians with different demands to try, on the ground of politics, to convince the other elements of Turkey of the rightness of their demands. They need to understand that they cannot convince with arms. Apart from arms, the road to persuasion is open.