Social restoration

We continue to move forward at an accelerating pace in the solution process. The obstructive events that have arisen during the process, far from disrupting it, have had an even more accelerating and encouraging effect. So much so that from this point on, the work of those who will try to sabotage the process is becoming increasingly difficult. They will have to find far more creative, original and, of course, effective ways of sabotage. We hope that, however hard their work may be, they will not even manage to attempt such a path.

One of the most important indicators that the process is working in a healthy way is that a clearly visible language of solution now dominates everyone's discourse. The ill-omened discourses that, until a month or two ago, immediately took captive the tongue of everyone who spoke on these matters have given way to an extremely careful and respectful language.

Discourse is the most important stage in the construction of reality. But at the same time, ongoing reality exerts its own pressure on discourse, and this in turn continues to steer the process in a certain direction. Everyone in this process carries the worry of what a wrong word could cost, and speaks or does not speak accordingly.

On the other hand, are there not still some who ask how the PKK could have agreed to the solution process, partly out of astonishment, and partly in the name of advising the organization and lamenting the organization's foolishness? They keep asking in return for what the PKK or Öcalan agreed to lay down arms. Gülay Göktürk, rightly, reminds those who ask "how the PKK can agree to lay down arms if it will not obtain a status" of the conditions under which Öcalan began the solution talks: do these conditions correspond to a period in which the organization was winning victory after victory against the security forces, or to the period in which it suffered its greatest losses in history?

For those who only keep giving the organization the usual advice, it is worth mentioning this for now as a simple reminder. Beyond this reminder, Turkey should focus on the way to continue this process without losing another single Kurdish or Turkish child. Because Turkey, with its 77 million people, is in the midst of a great leap forward.

In order to name this leap and this opening correctly, the vision expressed by our Foreign Minister Mr. Ahmet Davutoğlu during his contacts in Diyarbakır and his speech at Dicle University is very important. While describing the solution process as part of a comprehensive policy required by Turkey's new international vision, Davutoğlu names this process the "restoration process."

Social Restoration is in fact the most beautiful name that could be given to this process, and in a sense it implies the restitution of a situation that already existed among us, was lived, tried and was valid.

We do not need to produce a very creative formula for the solution process that will build the Turkey of the future. As Professor Davutoğlu said in his speech, the city Diyarbakır should take as its model is not Paris or London. When Diyarbakır was a cradle of civilization, Paris did not yet exist.

Today too, the model that Diyarbakır will follow in order to reach the level of human rights it deserves is none other than the restoration of its own past, together with Bursa, Eskişehir or Istanbul.

Today the AK Parti camp, which is the main vein from which the solution is made difficult, is not responsible for the oppression done for years to the Kurds or to the other children of the country; on the contrary, it itself consists of victims of the same oppression. It is always useful for the other camp to remember this often.

Today, while setting out the vision of social restoration, AK Parti cadres leave no room for the slightest concern about division. On the contrary, restoration not only returns the former dignity of the components that make up Turkey, it also realizes the vision of the new and strong Turkey formed together with all these components.

The irreversible process that has been entered into today shows the horizons of this restoration. On these horizons, a new and civilian constitution appears, to carry this process on and bring it to completion.

NOTE: The February issue of Stratejik Düşünce Dergisi was published under the title "Toward Social Restoration: A New Constitution."