The hard road: the solution process

"An operation was carried out through İmralı against the hawkish wing, known within the organization for its sectarian and confrontational aspects; the voice came from the Danes among us. The pens that announced the purge of the hawkish wing through reverse propaganda in the form of 'The process is stalling' have exposed themselves."

This is how Aslan Değirmenci of the daily Milat begins his article on what has recently happened in the resolution process. Who are the Danes among us? On a plain reading, surely no one would think of conducting a passport check. But in my opinion, what the skilled researcher Değirmenci is trying to draw attention to, as he does in far more detail in his recently published book "Zorlu Yol? İmralı Görüşmeleri" (Çıra Yayınları), is that it is entirely unclear which steps taken in the resolution process step on whose toes.

Only when the resolution process began were we able to understand that the real views of those who for years were assumed to favor an end to terror, a halt to the bloodshed, and an end to it in a way that leaves the political sphere no room for terror, were otherwise. The resolution process created a great shock in the political sphere, and this shock also displaced the positions of many people. Everyone began to experience a confusion of roles and status.

We could have expected some groups within the PKK to oppose the PKK's laying down of arms, and that would have been quite understandable. But when the organization, willingly or unwillingly, announced that it would abide by the new concept and roadmap placed before it by İmralı, #direnpkk exhortations began to come from entirely unexpected places. This is how we began to hear strange theses to the effect that "there can be no peace without democracy." And from whom? From the most probable friends one could predict of a peace process, should one be entered into.

Every event is a test, every test is a fork in the road, and at every fork people are flung to different places. Both the resolution process and the Gezi process have shown how misleading it can be to think of Turkey's political spectrum in ready-made molds. There are people whom the new situations leave jobless. It turns out that for some of those who we thought had been striving to see this problem end and be resolved, this joblessness is received worse than dealing with the problem itself. The management of resolution processes, therefore, requires bringing much different analyses into play.

We also see that the democracy hawks, who made more of a problem than the PKK itself of the PKK's laying down arms without obtaining anything in the resolution process, are these days seizing with an entirely different appetite on the news of strange activities carried out in the Southeast in the name of the PKK or the KCK. This time the argument is a little more comforting: instead of urging "not to lay down arms without obtaining anything," it is now easier to say "we told you so, the PKK will not give up its habits, and will not lay down its arms."

Martyrdoms declared in the name of the PKK, and the news about attempts these days to send more members up to the mountains, are actions that the PKK needs to explain, and that are entirely incompatible with the spirit of the process. They are oddities that require even Öcalan to turn and ask Kandil "what is going on?"

If these actions are being carried out in response to the government's still not having taken some legal steps, as both BDP circles and the PKK's so-called democrat commentators put it, it must be said that Öcalan's message at Nevruz is being distorted by these interpretations. Öcalan does not make legal regulations or new steps by the government a condition for laying down arms. Frankly, in the situation reached, he is saying that arms are no longer a way for the Kurdish movement, and he wants this path to be abandoned at all costs.

More plainly, from this hour on, what falls to the Kurdish movement is only politics. Not a politics in the shadow or under the guarantee of arms. There is no politics or political gain that arms can secure. On the contrary, the shadow of arms either kills every political gain or, at best, slows it down.

The interlocutor of the BDP or the Kurdish political movement is not only the AK Parti but the entire people of Turkey, Kurds included. Therefore it needs to know that, by following a path focused only on persuading the AK Parti, and especially by attempting to do this while showing a weapon from under the cloak, it can obtain no gain at all.

In today's political order, Kurds have the ground to voice all kinds of political demands freely and without being subjected to any prosecution, and to wage the political struggle for them, and this ground has become possible through the AK Parti's 11 years of reforms and actions. That is, in fact, the answer to the question of what Öcalan agreed to arm the PKK in return for was this from the beginning. The distance covered on the road of democratization has today pushed armed struggle, too, into an anachronistic position with no good outcome for the Kurds. That the militants actually fighting in the mountains do not see this sufficiently is quite natural. As for Öcalan, under the conditions of İmralı, it is, again because of his physical circumstances, far more possible for him to see it.

From this point on, the only one responsible for whether anything is obtained in the name of or for the Kurds will be the Kurdish politician. But for this, they must not fall for the incitement of the non-Kurdish circles (left or right), which, above all in order to restore their own positions, are trying to push the PKK back to its familiar position, that is, the field of terror. Moreover, the irresponsible behavior displayed in the process now entered will have no excuse before the Kurdish people, who have embraced the resolution with great excitement and hope.