Etyen Mahçupyan
Everyone has a value of use in today's politics. Political powers are quite willing to capitalize on this value as much as possible. The peace declaration that was signed by 1,128 academics, creating waves one month ago, was an instrumental attempt. The text described the clashes between security forces and PKK gangs in some neighborhoods in southeastern provinces by pinning all crimes on the state without mentioning the PKK. Moreover, it reduced the position of the state to acts that the U.N. defines as genocide. Indeed, the text had many one-sided, unfair and utterly false aspects. The signatories' argument that says: "We addressed remarks to the state alone, as we are its citizens," is rather tragic. This is because the text not only said what should be, but also defined the existing experiences by distorting reality.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's response to it pointed to a politically different value of use. The objective was to integrate conservative segments against such injustice and gather them around nationalist feelings in a single bloc. Calling the judiciary and universities to duty created an atmosphere that was convenient to be exploited, exposing many academics to overt injustices. This intervention did not serve the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) either, as it created a vulnerability of legitimacy and harmed the party at a time when discussions about a new constitution are ongoing. However, the peace declaration was so pathetic that it led to the formation of an appetite to take advantage of its value.
The dynamism of hectic politics caused the AK Party to lose an opportunity that it could have taken advantage of, and the PKK bloc got away with its mistake. The text, though, was already bad, and was hardly likely to yield any permanent benefit. It seems realistic to suppose that a large majority of the signatories signed the text without seeing or reading it. Indeed, many people who wanted peace might have thought that this was a sincere initiative. Unfortunately, however, the current position of politics is not of a kind that opens a sphere for clean feelings. In order to be clean, first you need to be purified of the dirt of you which you do not realize. For some reason, academics are quite inclined to consider themselves to always be clean. This tendency leads to the emergence of a risk that makes them an instrument to seemingly clean acts that have dirty functions.
Let us remember that these academics' declared objective was to bring peace and prevent the deaths of people. Certainly, this will be achieved by increasing the number and boosting the strength of those who are willing to achieve this in society. Currently, what is more important is to increase this number, particularly in the AK Party and the PKK. This is because peace is possible only with both sides highlighting peaceful politics simultaneously. So what did this declaration achieve? It strengthened the hand of those who had a hawkish perspective on the Kurdish question in the AK Party, as it was based on a malevolent evaluation. It also boosted the power of hawkish figures in the PKK, as its one-sided view supported the organization's current strategy. As a result, the war has become more acceptable for both parties and those who proposed peaceful politics in the structures of both parties stopped speaking.
In short, if this peace declaration was really written for peace and released to the public, we have to say that it was utterly nonsensical. If you do not find this assumption realistic, we have to assume that this act was intentionally done because of its value of use. Certainly, we cannot consider academics to be so naive to fail to know that they have become an instrument for political use. Perhaps it is realistic for the AK Party to prefer to remain on the same level as long as the opposition remains at its current level. I guess that this is no more than a 'medium-quality' trap that harms Turkey.