Etyen Mahçupyan
The Turkish original of this article was published as Ateşkes ihlâlinde 'yeni' Diyarbakır on 25th August 2015.
Barely a month after the HDP’s electoral success, the PKK opted for a strategy of terminating the de facto truce and using the HDP as its “spearhead” in Turkish politics. Hence while YDG-H units have been digging ditches and conducting mass agitation, and their hit-teams have been executing soldiers and policemen on a daily basis, what has fallen to the lot of HDP municipalities is to proclaim “democratic autonomy” or “self-government.” As for the government, by reverting to the situation “before” the Solution Process it has indicated that it has no intention of making any concessions in this power contest or tug-of-war.
In these circumstances, in order to foresee what the coming weeks and months are likely to bring, it becomes important to have a sense of what the people in the Southeast might be thinking and feeling, what criteria they might be judging the two sides by, how they might be reading politics and the region. Ayşe Yırcalı turns out to have visited the region precisely for this purpose, and her impressions were published by Al Jazeera Turk last Monday and Tuesday [17-18 August 2015].
“Instead of a gloomy and panicky state of mind, it is a generalized sort of common sense” that pervades Diyarbakır, Yırcalı notes: “While at the outset there was a strong tendency to keep out of the way, nowadays although social life after dark has slowed down, people are no longer pulling down their shutters, and families are able to spend at the least the day in parks without too much anxiety, it is said. Unlike the 6-8 October incidents, there is no panic in the air; violence does not seem to have played havoc with social life… People have come to hold the truce in such great value that they would rather not think about the possibility of losing it altogether.”
But this somewhat hopeful emotional backdrop cannot obscure a “new” and anxious situation, which is that the killing of two policemen in Ceylanpınar appears to have given rise to a different sort of mental fault-line. Up till now, it had been possible to impart a certain meaning to each and every return to arms by contexting it within the PKK’s overall strategy — but not this time. A considerably widespread view is that these murders were consciously and deliberately undertaken by the PKK as yet another step in the struggle, but that they backfired… Diyarbakır is going through some “self-questioning,” and this is sustaining a common emotional outlook that makes it possible for people to take their distances vis-à-vis the organization.
Indeed, it is this aloofness that “assumes concrete shape in all those appeals to the people for mass action going unanswered. The people have simply not been heeding calls for peace marches or for banging on pots-and-pans in the evening, it is said. Whereas there had been a massive popular response to the public appeal launched after the 5th June bomb explosion at an HDP election rally, now, goes the talk of the town, despite all the leaflets distributed to each and every single house and the repeated calls on television, the people are choosing to abstain.”
But this critical attitude to the PKK/HDP does not by itself indicate support for the government. For [Ayşe Yırcalı continues] “what we observed most intensively in Diyarbakır was disillusionment with the AKP as well as the [PKK] organization. It is thought that the government did not prove trustworthy, that it pursued a line of instrumentalizing the Solution Process, that in the last analysis, it did not really take equal rights for a Kurdish identity to heart. Hence it is that now Diyarbakır is also more distant to the AKP.”
There is a message in this for both sides: Diyarbakır has become much more self-confident. It is fed up with all this lethal pushing and shoving by the two sides. It has lost its respect for both of them. It has become impossible to trick or deceive, and it is going to follow neither in blind loyalty.