We are grappling with the ghost of a war that is actually long over.
But unfortunately, its victims continue to be real people.
The kids staring after receding coffins are also real, as are the unborn infants who have already lost their dads.
A bit like those Japanese soldiers hiding in the jungle who for years believed that World War II was still going on, the PKK, too, seems to think that it is still in the 1990s as it attempts to wage a “revolutionary people’s war” in today’s political environment.
As for Turkey’s previous ruling class and its intellectuals, they extend their “understanding” to, or at least they pretend to understand the PKK.
But showy titles or fancy slogans designed to appeal to adolescent mentalities cannot change the fact that today, killing soldiers, policemen or railway workers is nothing but murder.
Beneath those radical democratic pronouncements, it is the bloody, horrible visage of nationalism that shows itself.
* * *
Currently this country happens to be inhabited by media, academics and politicians that are ready and willing to embrace the devil itself at the drop of the single word “AKP.” Throughout the Solution Process, they worked very hard at getting the PKK to violate the truce, and now that it has happened they are working equally hard at finding excuses for it.
So “the AKP is not democratic”! So what if that is really the case? To hear them, one would think that the PKK is an ngo dedicated to humane relief.
We did not support the Solution Process because we for our part regarded the PKK as a democratic organization.
We supported the Solution Process so that in the process of the transformation of the state and the recognition of [Kurdish] civil and political rights, the PKK, too, as a sinful organization begat by a sinful earlier state, could lay down its arms, enabling those in the mountains to return home, and normalizing life in general.
Today, too, once the present fit of insanity is over, that is what has to be done.
* * *
Regardless of whether the government and not the PKK is responsible for ending the Solution Process, this can provide no legitimacy whatsoever for the PKK’s decision to go to war.
To be sure, the Solution Process and the PKK’s violation of the truce are not entirely disconnected from one another, but neither is the second the necessary and inevitable outcome of the first. Not even if it is the government that is wholly at fault.
For today, there can be no ethical justification at all for killing and dying in the name of whatever demands there are that still have to be met as part of the Kurdish question. There is no way you can excuse shedding blood for the recognition of any remaining rights and liberties.
To attribute recent events to the ruling party’s anger at losing its absolute majority is infantile, and reflects a desire to evade staring truth in the face. A journalist who has poisoned himself with Erdoğan-hatred might be capable of it, but it become ludicrous when repeated by Demirtaş.
OK, let’s assume that “the Palace wants war.” Doesn’t that make you vulnerable to the next question: “Do you, too, have to go along just because he wants it?”
* * *
That one did this and this one said that; it was he who upset the table; no, it was that other one who was the first to break his promise….
We can keep going in circles arguing about all this.
But what has to be done today in the name of the truth and by way of testifying to the truth is, first and foremost, to condemn this decision to go to war. Without blurring the identity of the culprit, without interposing vague subjects, without going off into political correctness, but calling a spade a spade.
Just as previously we were able to say that it was the state that saddled us with the Kurdish Question, that it was the state that was guilty of all those crimes for decades, just as we were able to call it a massacre when the state committed a massacre, or a murder when the state committed a murder. Now, too, to be able to say that it is the PKK that is responsible for this situation, and that it is also a murder to kill a policeman that is the father of the two-month baby Asya.
This is where a genuine search for justice and a solution has to begin.
The rest is just empty talk. Nothing else.