The Kurds' PKK problem

Those who keep trying in the resolution process to fill the PKK's head with snow water, and, when that is not enough, openly urge it to make trouble, must be very happy and hopeful these days. They may be perceiving clear scenes suggesting that the resolution process could end altogether. At the very least, the spoilsport behavior they could never see from the state they are seeing in abundance from the PKK's armed groups.

The organization is abusing the patient stance the state shows in the name of remaining faithful to the resolution process to the point of well exceeding the limits of tolerance, taking the patience of the state and the government as a kind of permission for the practices of its own feudal lordship. In broad daylight it blocks roads, checks identities, abducts people. In doing so, as Yalçın Akdoğan said in his article yesterday, the PKK is blocking not the state's path but the path of the resolution process.

The PKK does not stop there; as if resurrecting the era of unsolved murders peculiar to the nineties, it abducts and kills members of different political groups (Hüda-Par). When it was expected to lay down its arms, since the hour the resolution process began it has been strengthening its mountain cadre even further by drawing thousands of children to the mountains.

Of course it is not possible for the state or the government to be patient for long in the face of all these moves.

Those who now shamelessly repeat that the state has still not taken a step in the resolution process are trying to divert attention from the fact that the truly decisive step, the initiating step, the precondition step, is the complete laying down of arms. Even so, for this inaction of the soldiers, who have not carried out a single public-order operation since the hour the resolution process began, to be treated as an opportunity to establish dominance over territory is extremely dangerous...

Dangerous, because these are moves aimed at provoking military intervention, even at forcing it after a certain point.

It is now not even necessary to say it: all these moves have nothing to do with the Kurdish issue. Because all the statist discourses and policies that gave rise to the Kurdish issue have by now been sufficiently revised. That this revision was brought about owing to the PKK's armed terror, that is, by wearing the state down with violence and terror, is a thesis that both the PKK and the BDP constantly propagate in the region. In this way it tries to make the Kurds indebted to it.

Yet everyone knows that in Turkey before the AK Parti, the state's being worn out by bloodshed was not even in question. It could have continued the war with the PKK forever, because the PKK's armed terror served to sustain that conception of the state with greater confidence and large gains. That is why the source of the Kurds' gains today is never the PKK; on the contrary, the AK Parti's approach, which changed this conception of the state and replaced it with a humane conception of equal citizenship, has also eliminated the Kurdish issue.

Today in Turkey there is no Kurdish issue left, but the Kurds' clear PKK problem still stands in the middle. In the disarmament and withdrawal process set as the precondition of the resolution process, the PKK insists on not laying down its arms because it foresees the end of its own organizational existence.

In fact the PKK still does not invest in a political struggle or competition in which arms are entirely out of the picture. It cannot dare to. In fact, if it did dare, it might perhaps be an original and successful path for itself too. But in a way it is not taking a risk, and it does not give up the weapons, which are in any case guaranteed and have always provided it unfair competitive advantages.

With this patience it shows toward it, the state is taking away the unfair propaganda advantages the PKK has used until now, but meanwhile the PKK continues to test patience. The PKK's moves have no meaning other than insistently inviting the end of the resolution process.

Moreover, both the PKK and the BDP continue to take care not to utter an official word against the resolution process. Because amid all this there is now a Kurdish public opinion they cannot avoid taking into account. They are encountering an opposition never encountered until yesterday.

They are being forced these days to face the reality that the children they have lured or spirited away to the mountains, whether by deception or with consent, have mothers, fathers and families. One way or another, the resolution process has made clear as day to people that an alternative politics is possible. However the PKK propagandizes, it can no longer convince people, starting from claims that the Kurds are aggrieved and oppressed, of the legitimacy of armed struggle or that it brings benefits to the Kurds.

Today mothers and fathers who are in revolt against the PKK are shouting at the PKK that Kurdish children are not its property and that it cannot recklessly gamble with their lives for its own power.

While the parents do this, the indifference shown toward all that is happening by the BDP/HDP, which should play a role in politics, is also being recorded.

Let us see whether this party will again, with another name change in the future, be able to erase the traces of the indifference and irresponsibility it has shown in this process.