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I was talking with a friend of mine from Berlin. He said, “I become happy when I come to Turkey. There is excitement and chaos here. For instance, we don't know the names of any generals in Germany. Here, your spirit is being shaped according to every new general. Frankly, I envy you.”
Apples on the other side of the wall are the sweetest! This is my friend's way of thinking, but I am thinking differently. I think we are not making any progress. We keep repeating the same old. For instance, the closure case filed against the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party, or DTP. If you ask me how many similar cases have been filed so far, I cannot give you a correct answer. All the parties formed by the Kurdish movement were shut down in the 1990s. Closure cases against political parties seem ordinary, routine developments. After all, we are talking about a political entity here that gained six to seven votes from a group of people speaking a different language and took the stage so as to voice cultural, political and social demands for them. The Kurdish issue is one of the most critical problems of Turkey. We lost hundreds of thousands of people and spent hundreds of millions for the war against Kurdish terrorists and for weapons. A normalization process for a party that cannot voice itself in Parliament, in local administration, i.e. on legal ground, has never come. They form the party and after a while they face a closure case. This is like a divine order. In the end, the party is closed. Every closure affects a dilemma You can dissolve political parties, but if a party is based on a political reality, based on the characteristic of social and culture representation, closure of the party does not change that fact. A new one is formed afterwards and the political struggle continues where it was left off. In fact, it has not. Every closure case is sending negative signals to Kurds suffering a dilemma. Proponents of the voice, “It is risky to continue the struggle on legal grounds and there is no such opportunity introduced. Let's climb up to the mountain,” are increasing in number. It is not a piece of cake to develop policies on national belongingness and to create solutions to ethnic problems. In many countries never-ending clashes continue just for this reason. So the objection, “But they don't distant themselves from terrorists,” is brought to the agenda right away. The relationship between the DTP and the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, is based on a social ground beyond their willpower. In the perspective of the Kurdish issue, they, in a way, represent two options lying before Turkey: a solution with either politics or violence. In the end, both political trends are products of the Kurdish issue. The difference is the way of expressing the issue and introducing a solution. One is trying to solve this on legal grounds and the other is on the grounds of terror. There are two conflicting inclinations within the dominant view in Turkey. Since one of them sees the problem as a law-and-order issue, it doesn't pay attention to the entities on legal ground, even sees them as dangerous and therefore believing that a military solution can be found. The closure case against the DTP pushes away groups who want to solve the problem on political grounds because parties such as the DTP represent a social reality and if you are willing to solve this problem, they are the addressee. Local elections and the Kurdish issue As local elections approach, the governing Justice and Development Party, or AKP, sets the following target: By winning the local elections in the Southeast we will wipe them from politics and therefore we make a significant progress towards a solution. It is understandable that the AKP wants to win the local elections in the Southeast. But if you reach a conclusion like “I will solve the Kurdish issue,” this is only an illusion. The Kurdish issue is an identity issue. The Kurdish identity is a regional identity and the success of winning an election in the region does not mean that the issue has disappeared. The identity demand is a rooted historic, social and cultural demand. You cannot emphasize the religious identity and substitute with the Kurdish identity. In conclusion, the DTP's closure will only slow down the process and narrow the legal ground … |
