The Kurds are not the problem, and the problem is the problem of all of us

In his speech in Diyarbakır square on 12 August 2005, Erdoğan had said that he "recognized the Kurdish question" and declared that he would solve this problem that had weighed upon the subject for eighty years. He had not said this with a hidden agenda of the kind in which earlier politicians acknowledged it but took not a step along the road and did not intend to take one. Indeed, with a determination that no politician up to then had dared, he studied the issue thoroughly and set about solving it.

Whether it was the Kurdish language problem, the identity problem, the problem of organization and education, the state of emergency, or inequality in regional development, whatever constituted the problem, he went after it. He made all the necessary legal arrangements and sincerely demonstrated the difference in approach and discourse. When the time came, even at the price of "drinking hemlock poison," he entered the opening process, and, when that was not enough, the solution process.

The solution process in fact also envisaged the PKK laying down its arms in return for the recognition of Kurdish existence, identity, language and culture and their receiving the due respect. The counterpart of the disarmament process would of course be the armed PKK, and the hemlock-poison side of the matter was that a terrorist organization was being treated as a counterpart. Because of the acceptance that it had a certain degree of standing among the Kurds in the Southeast for one reason or another, this also had to be done. It was done. How these steps, taken so that every day neither the Kurdish children who had joined the PKK, deceived or voluntarily, nor our soldiers, security officials or civil servants, nor our civilians would have their blood shed, so that this sedition within our people would be extinguished as soon as possible, ended is well known.

From Erdoğan's standpoint, the Kurdish dimension of the matter had in fact been solved. There was no longer a Kurdish question in Turkey, because the problem had been solved to the end to a great extent in its dimensions of language, recognition, respect, and equal treatment.

This subject, that is, the matter concerning the Kurds, was not one that required the PKK to be treated as a counterpart. Today, since the matter has been reopened, let us remind and repeat: on the Kurdish question, the PKK is not a counterpart either for Erdoğan or for Turkey in general. Essentially, on the Kurdish question, DEM too cannot be regarded as a counterpart in the capacity of representative of the Kurds.

The only counterpart of the Kurdish question is the Kurdish people, and the way to talk with them is through the dialogues that legitimate political parties establish with the Kurds. Like the dialogues people establish with Turks, with the religious, with Arabs, with secularists, with workers, with retirees. Beyond that, no one should presume to regard himself as the owner, sole representative, or patron of the Kurds. The blockades that those who presume this have placed upon politics have always had the effect in Turkey of clogging the way of politics and impairing the integrity and health of our political body as a country.

The perception that formed in the solution process, that the PKK was being treated as a counterpart in solving the Kurdish question, was of course not commensurate with the work being done. Indeed, when Erdoğan said many times that there was no Kurdish question, he was speaking not to contradict his words of 2005 but simply to express a stage he had reached in the process. Erdoğan's words that "there is no Kurdish question" were attempted to be portrayed, especially by PKK and HDP circles, as Erdoğan's having returned to the politics of denial of the classic Turkish official discourse. Yet the meaning is quite simple. Erdoğan was expressing, almost as a challenge, what he had done so far in the name of the Kurdish question, and of course these words did not contradict the words in 2005 in which he said he recognized the matter.

That Erdoğan, though he is the leader who ended the matter in Turkish politics, has been promoted by the PKK almost as the greatest enemy of the Kurdish people, and that attempts have been made to turn him into the greatest object of hatred for the Kurdish political movement, is also a very unjust situation. But it is not hard to understand. For the PKK, which saw the Kurdish question as a field of livelihood and power, the matter's having ended means that its reason for existence has also disappeared.

For that reason, the greatest obstacle before all the openings aimed at ending the Kurdish question has always been the PKK. It tried to convince the Kurds that they had obtained all their gains thanks to its own armed struggle. Yet the approach of Erdoğan and the AK Party to the Kurdish question was, before being political, a matter of principle, related to a conception based on belief in Turkey's bodily integrity. The PKK, on the other hand, was speaking from the same place and running to the same place as the racist-nationalist minds that created the problem from the start and constantly fed it. Ensuring that the Kurds were separate from Turkey and from the Turks was a goal loaded into the PKK's mission software. Their sabotaging of the solution process was inevitable, and they did sabotage it. Their bosses, the US and Israel, who loaded this software into them, while continuing to support them by arming them in Syria, are showing sufficiently that the matter has nothing to do with the Kurds, that it is entirely about Israel's security or its occupation.

The initiative Devlet Bahçeli made last week pointed to a very important horizon for the PKK's rescue from its domination both over the Kurds and over DEM. Bahçeli continued in the following days to fill out the substance of that initiative. The following words he said at the Ziya Gökalp commemoration meeting are words with the power to uproot all the nationalist codes that brought the Kurdish question into being and gave the PKK room to maneuver, and to revive our essential political body:

"For Turks and Kurds to love one another is both a religious and a political obligation for both sides. If there is a Turk who does not love the Kurds, he is not a Turk. If there is a Kurd who does not love the Turks, he is not a Kurd. Turks and Kurds today face common dangers. They can be saved from these dangers only with a common determination."

That Bahçeli voiced these thoughts at the Ziya Gökalp commemoration meeting on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of his death makes his words all the more meaningful. Perhaps these are words that will also require Gökalp to be read and understood anew. As is known, Gökalp, who contributed with his ideas to the formation of Republican Turkey, did not live long enough to see how his ideas were applied. Did he imagine such a Turkey with respect to the relationship between Turks and Kurds, or the problems experienced later with Islam? Of course, even from his ideas the gap in application had opened very greatly, but that is another subject, worth discussing, perhaps

we will return to it later.