The carrier of the message is part of the message

The events we live through every day show how open the new solution process is to incalculable surprises. Whatever the intention behind the BDP deputies' Black Sea tour, it presented us with a new test, and therefore a new area of risk. The protests, organized to give the appearance of angry public reaction, surely brought the heart of everyone with optimistic expectations about the process to their mouths. Yet it was soon understood that the reactions were not spontaneous but resulted from provocation through the efforts of organized operatives. Truly, these events might have required a fresh interpretation of the silence observed in public opinion since the hour the new process began and understood as an affirmation.

Questioning the BDP members' intentions in this trip is out of place and unnecessary. Their choice to explain the opening especially to the segments furthest from them, in order to contribute to the process, was of course a choice they had to evaluate strategically. A climate in which every person of Turkey can freely go to every part of Turkey is indisputably a choice that we must all try to build together. If someone's being unable to set foot in some parts of the country is thought of as another's gain, that is an even greater heedlessness and misguidance.

Another surprise of the process was the small-scale crisis that developed over who would go to İmralı. This debate even gave rise to the thought that it was effective enough to create the perception that the process had been frozen. Fortunately, with the determination of the new names to go to İmralı, the sense of stagnation in the solution process was removed. We saw that the claim over the initiative to determine the names to go to Öcalan plunged the process into a strange gloom for a while. What makes the event strange, of course, is that such a large and comprehensive process was reduced to such a claim.

That the politics the BDP members produced in this process was drawn down to this claim is a serious problem that the BDP members themselves must evaluate in terms of their capacity to produce politics. For a long time, at the price of almost making even their presence in Parliament meaningless, the BDP members pointed to İmralı as the address of a political initiative. Yet in an environment in which İmralı is openly and most comprehensively treated as an interlocutor, an attempt to produce a crisis over holding or not holding meetings had no explanation even by its own logic. That is why it was inevitable that this insistence would soon hit the wall of reason and that they would be forced to give it up.

What mattered was that the will for a solution and the process were continuing. In this process, as much as the message carried between İmralı and the parties, the carrier of this message is also very important. This is not only about past cases in which the carriers of the message distorted its content as they wished, or abused the trust placed in them through the message carried. Undoubtedly this sensitivity is also being observed at the highest level in the names determined. But in this process, in which communication accidents can cost many things and have often occurred before, the fact that the carrier of the message is also part of the message is not being overlooked.

It is asked how those who are met at Öcalan's level, whom those holding weapons in the mountains call "leader," are being met while those who embraced them are excluded. How can we explain that these two are not the same thing?

First of all, the images of meeting and embracing those who actually hold weapons meant endorsing and sanctifying armed actions and terror. Rest assured, if that famous embrace of the BDP deputies had truly carried even the slightest hint of criticism of armed actions, that image would not have formed in that way. On the contrary, it was understood as the support and encouragement for terror by those who were able to do politics freely and under the armor of immunity.

Second, the meetings with Öcalan are being held not to approve a certain politics of his, but to persuade him to end violence and terror as a tool. To think that all kinds of meetings with terrorists become normalized because those meetings are being held would be naivety at best.

For now, while those images are etched in minds in this way, it is impossible for a message to be carried by those who played roles in those images without being affected by this. And it is unthinkable that this message could contribute to the solution process.

Those in the second BDP delegation that went to İmralı today are names who, by their personal characteristics, can give a different color and content to the message to be carried. We must know that these names are not names determined unilaterally by only the government, or only Öcalan, or only the BDP. That all sides have agreed on these names itself shows the good faith of the message and that the will in play to see the process proceed in a healthy way continues to function.