The Turkish original of this article was published as “Yeni yaşam”dan geçtik, sadece “yaşam”ı savunsaydınız’ on 3rd August 2015.
No need to beat about the bush.
In the past, it was the state that was repeatedly guilty of the resumption of violence, but this time it is the PKK.
While various things that Erdoğan said during the election campaign were in point of fact tantamount to ending the Solution Process, this still does not legitimize the PKK’s re-launching of a “revolutionary” or “evolutionary” or indeed any other kind of war to start killing soldiers, policemen, or railroad workers all over again.
* * *
So what if it were the case that “the AKP does not want any kind of solution”?
The conditions for ethnic or political violence simply do not exist in this country. Gone are the days of denial [of Kurdish identity], suppression, repression, forced migration, massacres, torture, burning villages, or extra-legal execution.
Whatever rights that still have to be won, have to be won through peaceful, civilian struggles.
Today, killing soldiers or policemen, killing any human being, is nothing but murder.
If this is not accepted before anything else, other statements like “we want peace” or “we are against all kinds of violence regardless of where it might be coming from” will remain as nothing more than meaningless pronouncements uttered purely for the sake of not having said nothing.
* * *
Predictably, what is happening now is that those who, out of class or ideological or Islamophobic hatred, are ready to justify whatever the PKK does, including the most archaic elements of the Turkish left, are trying to come up with some kind of “explanation” for these murders. Just as they did in 2004, too, when the PKK had once again resumed fighting without any explanation whatsoever.
Clearly, there is a whole crowd of journalists and academics in this country who are ready and willing to say that “this is where the AKP’s policies have brought us” regardless of what the PKK may do or have done. The best among them can only bring themselves to assert that “the PKK has fallen into a trap set by the AKP in once more resorting to violence.”
But again, short of condemning these murders in a clear and unambiguous way.
* * *
Let’s leave them aside, and take a look at the state of the party that had come out advocating a “New Life.”
The HDP is trying to adopt a politically correct sounding language in trying to gloss over its responsibility over human life. In the face of the PKK’s murders, it is not demonstrating anything like its former determination and enthusiasm that were so much in display when it was picking all those fights with Erdoğan.
Despite all the blood being spilled for many days now in this country, and after all the criticism that he has been subjected to, “we do not approve of the PKK’s violent actions” is the most Demirtaş has been able to bring himself to say.
Without however any of the conviction and energy that he was bringing to bear on his polemics with the ruling party; at a much lower volume, and only by way of responding to what he is asked.
* * *
“If I could be certain that there would be no provocations whatsoever, I would have attended the funeral of that policeman, for example,” says Demirtaş. “I would have gone to his family, I would have kissed his family’s, I would have kissed those people’s hands.”
He doesn’t need to attend funerals. All he has to do is to turn to the PKK and tell them not to kill. It would be enough for him to say: “You are not killing in my name. This is nothing but murder.”
But neither the HDP nor Demirtaş are doing anything of the sort. Instead, they confine themselves to shilly-shallying statements like “all hands should be taken off the trigger.”
Just what is it that Demirtaş has had to say about the murder of the first two policemen?
“War and conflict has an inner logic that is impossible for us civilians to understand. If we cannot intervene in that inner logic that seems bitter and meaningless to us, we cannot stop these deaths either. As a person engaged in civilian politics, I cannot answer the question of why they were killed. They shouldn’t have been killed. Nobody should be dying. In our inner logic, in our world of civilian politics there is no way this can be explained. I cannot find any reason for it.”
Just about the only thing he hasn’t said is that “the Aegean is not a lake.”
“Within the logic of war, there is a certain consistency to both what the state is doing and the PKK is doing. It seems meaningless to us. But we have to keep that reality in mind,” he says. Without stopping to think of just how terrible a legitimating excuse this might be if tomorrow it is brought to bear against them.
But so, this is how things stand when it is the PKK that is doing the killing.
As to what happens when it is the state that does the killing, you don’t really need a postmodern sort of textual analysis.
Conside the language that he employed when two PKK members who fled after killing some policemen were chased down and killed in a Bingöl operation.
“Even if they were members of the organization, such extralegal execution is tantamount to murder,” Demirtaş was saying. “Yes, those two people have been murdered,” he kept saying; “the state, too, has committed murder,” he kept saying; “a prime minister cannot so brazenly put this affair to sleep,” he kept saying.
Yes indeed, one should not brazenly be putting certain things to sleep.
Just when is extralegal execution a “murder” and when does it become “something impossible to approve,” this, too, is worth asking.
As well as the fate of all those promises, predicated on such radical democratic discourses, that have now come to nought.