The revolt of the mothers whose children were taken to the mountains

We have also seen that in an environment where the violence that had become the country's routine until about 17 months ago is gone, issues can be discussed much more easily, and every kind of problem or demand can be voiced much more easily. In fact, we can take the resolution process back to earlier times. When Beşir Atalay announced the Democratic Opening process in August 2009, he was also giving signs that there was no longer a Kurdish issue in Turkey.

Because what is called the Kurdish issue is largely the problem of the Kurdish language and of recognition. Since we have entered a period in which both have now been recognized in the state's discourse and nothing is left that cannot be spoken about on the ground of Kurdish politics, the part of the problem related to Kurdishness should have been settled.

And indeed it was. Today the margin of Kurdish politics, that is, the margin of what can be debated, spoken, expressed and demanded, has widened immensely.

Kurdishness, with its language, culture and standing, has taken its place as a normal component of the country. Even the issue of mother-tongue education, which can be considered the most extreme, was recognized, a few days before the March 30 elections, with a law passed in the TBMM, at least as a path for private schools. The favor shown to these schools may press the state to support them as well. But for that, the truly real demand and the picture need to be seen.

First of all, one must expect those who are truly wealthy and who generally voice the demand for mother-tongue education most loudly to send their own children to these schools. Although those segments generally do not send their own children to these schools, they want it adopted through the state as a requirement and given compulsorily to poor, destitute Kurdish children. What they want, what they wish to do, is to make the poor Kurdish people bear the burden of the nationalism they want to pursue. In the end, a person cannot have Kurdish education imposed on him as a compulsion simply because he is Kurdish.

The way is not closed to taking a further step on this matter, but for this step to be truly healthy and not otherwise contradict freedoms, there is no way other than seeing the demand clearly.

In an environment where the tutelage of an armed organization still makes itself felt most heavily, the real demand cannot be expected to emerge. Unfortunately, there is an organizational structure that has not kept its promise of disarmament expected of it in the resolution process, and this structure is calculating, from within the process, the formation of conditions that would secure the abandonment to it of a domain it can rule.

While the organization is expected in the resolution process to fulfill the condition of disarmament, it is, on the contrary, aiming to increase its presence in the field even more, and fills the content of what it calls democratic autonomy in a way meaningful to itself. When it should be withdrawing its armed elements in the mountains abroad, it continues during the process to recruit ever more members to the mountains.

This is not a move compatible with the spirit of the resolution process. The families of these children, who were forcibly torn from their families and taken to the mountains and most of whom are under 18, have begun, for the first time recently, to make their voices heard.

First a mother in Diyarbakır started a protest in response to the abduction to the mountains of a child who had been taken on a picnic on April 23. The mother, whose protest took the BDP deputies and the municipality directly as her addressees, led the organization to hand the child over to his family.

Then, again in Diyarbakır, mothers whose children had been taken to the mountains in similar circumstances, numbering 9 as of today, began their protests. When the BDP-HDP deputies they addressed answered them "be proud, your children have gone to the mountains," the mothers voice the discourse of a new movement, saying "if you are so fond of it, go up to the mountains yourselves with your children whom you never let out of your sight."

Undoubtedly, here the mothers' revolt movement, which has emerged for the first time in a 30-year process, is as significant as these HDP deputies' indifference toward the resolution process. We know that this movement has been waiting for years for an opportunity to emerge. The 14-year-old child of one of the protesting women was taken to the mountains by the PKK three years ago. A militant movement produced from 14-year-old children points not to the Kurdish issue but only to the terror problem.

In essence, whenever a democratic autonomy in the sense understood by the BDP or HDP people finds a field of actual application, we are talking about a situation in which no one other than those actually subject to the organization is safe and no one exercises any right of expression or existence. For example, the activities of other student groups at the universities in the region are obstructed by this logic and by violence. What took place last week in Lice and at Siirt University is very interesting in this respect. A group of HDP members wants to obstruct students who wanted to gather and read a statement to condemn the executions in Egypt, and the justification is stated as being that such moves cannot be allowed at Siirt University without their permission.

Democratic autonomy thus turns into a crude show of force, no different from demanding that a field be left in which a certain organizational structure will rule as its own fiefdom.