Whose concern is the PKK's gain?

In fact this is exactly how it goes. When the process of resolving a chronic social problem is entered, it is quite normal for everyone to be seized by the haste of a profit-and-loss assessment. In one respect, you will be at ease if you take the unpleasant words as empty chatter uttered within the encompassing atmosphere of the process.

Because in the end, within the more dominant development of the process, these words have no combat value left; ultimately the public support for the process and the new atmosphere it creates turn keeping up with empty words into pointless dry noise. Still, even if they are empty chatter, what is said is somehow put on record, and everyone has in the meantime revealed his nature.

The state of those who worry about the gains the PKK has not obtained from this process has taken on a cautionary character in the meantime. It upsets them terribly that both Öcalan and the PKK have withdrawn from the point of putting forward a condition about the nature of the state. They try not to show it, but it seems that for them the PKK has increasingly become the instrument for settling all their accounts with the state. In a spiral of violence in which they themselves do not dare take part directly, they desire that the PKK continue the fight on their behalf at the cost of Kurdish youths' lives. Yet Kurdish youths have no interest at all in this terror continuing. That is why the first open and clear winners of the farewell to arms are Kurdish youths, and their parents.

Isn't what the Kurds or the PKK hoped for in this fight, and what they finally accept today, in one respect a matter that concerns only them? To see the point the PKK has reached today as a loss, for either the organization's base or the Kurdish people, in whose name soever, requires sanctifying in advance terror as a legitimate or rightful way. It turns out that inside many so-called democrats there was a suppressed terrorist spirit and we did not know it. This process seems also to have caused this spirit to come out a little.

Besides those who remind the PKK of its losses, we continue to watch those who remind the "nation" of the betrayal it is being subjected to through this process. Turkey is definitely being freed from a senseless violence that has lasted 30 years by its own initiative and entirely by its own politics.

As a matter of fact, this new process is an auspicious one in which no one comes out a loser. Besides a broad political space in which they can freely express and defend all their views and rights, the Kurds will take increasingly greater shares of the country's welfare level through the development offensive that will be directed at the Southeast after the resolution. Surely no one will claim that this share will be at the expense of the rest of the country. Moreover, once the approaches that see the Kurdish problem simply as an economic development problem, which have always been found humiliating by Kurds, are overcome, how much the Kurds suffer from economic backwardness can become the subject of more realistic assessments.

On the other hand, from the point of view of the "nation", the resolution process functions as a complete restoration that pulls back from the brink a country that had come to the threshold of fragmentation. There is no doubt that recognising Kurds as Kurds and giving them their rights is a process that leads the country not to division but to greater integration. The place that insisting on the opposite has brought us to is in any case plain.

Today the resolution of the Kurdish problem is not a matter limited to responding to the demands of Kurds; it is a step required by being a great country. It does not shrink the country, it enlarges it. And having the courage to resolve the terror problem in its present form, as a matter connected in one way or another to the Kurdish problem, is again a move that shows the country's political skill, capacity and courage, one that befits only great countries.

As a country able to take this step, Turkey also moves from the image of a small country incapable of resolving even its simple problems, flailing childishly for decades in the middle of a small problem, to the image of a great country. Behind this image, doesn't the fact that the elements of the country have made peace with one another, the reality of a more consolidated unity, solidarity and brotherhood, bring it closer to the reality of being a nation? Could Turkey, as a whole, as a nation, have a better gain than this?

One does not become a nation by saying "we are a nation". Being a nation is a process that must be cherished and worked at. Let no one worry: with this process the people of Turkey have come closer to being a nation than ever before.