Akın Özçer
The Turkish original of this news commentary was published as Le Monde PKK propagandasını sürdürüyor on 11th August 2015.
Through a new article signed by its special correspondent Allan Kaval and presented under the title L’amertume des Kurdes engagés contre l’Etat islamique (The bitter feelings of the Kurds engaged in fighting Islamic State), Le Monde continues to maintain its position as the French vpice of the PKK against Turkey. Sticking to his pursuit of the PKK/HDP line on recent events in the region, Kaval presents the PKK as a harmless and innocent Workers’ Party of Kurdestan that is solely committed to fighting against IS (DAESH), and the HDP as nothing more than a pro-Kurdish leftist party.
Halfway through his report, Kaval narrates how in Silopi on Friday PKK youth clashed with the security forces that arrived with bulldozers to fill up the ditches that they (the PKK youth) had dug. During the ensuing clash several houses were destroyed and people were injured, some severely, he says. He then claims that somehow the police ended up killing not PKK fighters but three Kurdish civilians. It was in retaliation against these deaths, he says, that in Cizre, Van and Ağrı the PKK then killed a policeman and two soldiers. So these “civilian” Kurds come to be justly revenged on the police and the army!
Kaval goes on to talk of the Kurdish movement’s complaints about President Erdoğan’s “manipulations.” Through its success in the last general elections the HDP has deprived the AKP of its absolute majority and forced it into trying either for a seemingly impossible coalition government or for early elections, he notes. He then turns the floor over to the HDP’s Şırnak MP Faysal Sarıyıldız. This is the same Faysal Sarıyıldız who stands accused of gun-running for the terrorist organization, about whom therefore a summary of findings has been drawn up put before the National Assembly (which could eventually lead to removal of his parliamentary immunity). So for his part, this is what Sarıyıldız says: “The Turkish (AKP) government is provoking the PKK into declaring a new war in order to discredit the HDP in any early elections and once more achieve an absolute majority to set up its own government.”
As also demonstrated by the last Peace Rally, so-called, this view provides the basis of the HDP’s “We are not going to allow you to wage war” thesis. While seeming to do no more than qupte Sarıyıldız, Kaval is actually presenting this thesis as an absolute truth. As if there are no opinions worth considering other than the PKK/HDP line, he doesn’t even bother to touch upon what the majority of Turkish society might be thinking about these developments.
But of course, this is not all he has to say about the people’s revolutionary war launched by the PKK/HDP against Turkey. According to Kaval, this is what an ordinary citizen by the name of “Resul Taş” has to say: “War through Daesh is what Turkey uses to make war against the Kurds. Turkish planes keep bombing our fighters, while Daesh keeps killing us in Rojava and Iraq.” Next, Kaval underlines the following view stated by Salih Gülenç, “one of the Şırnak cadres of the Kurdish movement,” which Kaval says “is shared by the Kurdish people of the area”: “Turkey is deceiving the West; they say they are attacking Daesh but this is just a coverup for fighting against the Kurds.”
Allan Kaval writes that “the Kurds of Turkey are astonished at why Western countries are not coming out to oppose this Turkish policy” — as if all those Kurds are part and parcel of the PKK/HDP line. But what is really astonishing is how Le Monde, famous for its objectivity, can bring itself to publish all these Kaval articles (this not being the first) given to one-sided PKK propaganda.