Imprudent Optimism

After the first anticipated news and commentary on the new solution process we have entered, we now move on to another stage of assessment, one whose subject is those very commentaries and news items. The attitudes taken toward the Imrali process naturally become news, because how such a process will be received, and by whom, is both a matter of natural curiosity and gives signs of how successful or healthy the process will be.

However, classifying the attitudes taken in the meantime produces very interesting pictures. Among them are those who greet the process with enthusiasm, those who always maintain their pessimism, and those who describe it as Imrali's or the organization's routine winter maneuver and say they have no expectations from the process, and so on. And there are also the segments that my esteemed friend Prof. Mazhar Bagli calls "cautious," and about whom he rightly asks, "caution about what, caution against whom?" We can understand those acting on behalf of the state or the organization leaving a margin of caution for themselves, looking at how past negotiation processes ended; but what is the meaning of intellectuals voicing this "caution" so much? Bagli has drawn attention to how, in an interesting way, the "not letting go of caution" stance of democratic intellectuals in particular can easily be converted into the message to the organization of "not laying down arms." Frankly this is not an oddity to be overlooked.

According to this classification we probably belong in the class of "incautious optimists."

Frankly, however much naivety the label may carry, I regard optimism as the most important quality of a sincere political will. I believe that one who is not optimistic cannot change anything in politics and cannot make any promise to people. For one who is not optimistic has no faith in himself, in his own work, in his own word being able to be effective, and this is, from the outset, a state in complete contradiction with the nature of politics. Can you imagine a politician's discourse that believes nothing in the world will change, that everything will remain the same and "bad"? Would they not ask the man: if everything is so condemned to evil, then how are we to believe that you are not a part of that evil as well?

Let this much political philosophy suffice for now. Let us continue to dwell on the likely consequences of the talks with Ocalan. Let us also take into account what kinds of difficulties the process has. In my previous article I said that one of the most important problems of this process is the problem of the PKK being run by a single hand. Indeed the economic, social and political rent areas that emerged with the activities of an organization of 35 years have produced a "system" within the PKK that no one can run alone.

In one part of this system there are international powers, in another forces within the state, in another the organization's own elite and power struggles. Within this system there is a limit to what even a leader of Ocalan's stature can do, but this does not mean he can do nothing. On the contrary, this situation shows only that he cannot do what he would do with a single word, and that he must "manage" the resulting situation. That is why, although the Silvan attack showed the limits of Ocalan's word "at that time," today we are at another time, and the process being lived through has created a new environment in which Ocalan's word is more effective.

Ocalan reportedly told Ahmet Turk and Ayla Akat Ata, who met with him on Imrali, that the environment of conflict and violence in Turkey constitutes an obstacle to human rights and democratic development. He added that the violence experienced in the Kurdish question in particular plays a fundamental role in this and that violence must be ended in order to overcome this impasse.

This finding is in fact Ocalan's accurate reading of a reality that has for quite some time been putting heavy pressure on the PKK. The PKK has for quite some time been rowing against the flow of this reality, and this has been making it increasingly unsustainable for itself.

Although there is an economy on which the PKK stands as an organization, it is seen to be getting increasingly difficult to sustain that economy with this lack of politics. Because that economy can ultimately be sustained only up to a point, by gaining for the organization while continually making everyone else lose, especially the Kurdish people, that is, the organization's target constituency. Indeed it is increasingly losing its credibility both with those segments and with the parties at home and abroad to whom it wants to explain its rightfulness.

This is the very basic reality that feeds my optimism, but another more important dimension of this reality is that the Kurdish question already remains very small in the face of the great role Turkey is trying to play in the region.

In the mind of the government that has run Turkey for 10 years, the Kurdish question has already been solved, and completing what is missing has been left as a matter of timetable. The terror problem, on the other hand, is a problem Turkey must solve in the new order of international relations by bringing every kind of political intelligence into play. For a Turkey that claims zero problems with its neighbors, and whose quality as a mediator and problem solver in all of the world's troubled regions stands out more with each passing day, finding the real interlocutors of a problem within itself and solving it with them should not be considered so far-fetched.

You see, there are many reasons for optimism. First of all our faith in ourselves, in our sincerity and in the certainty that this sincerity will change things, and then of course that the developments outside us too are in a channel that increasingly forces the solution process further.

What more could one want? Where in this picture should we place caution?