The Turkish original of this article was published as Hendeğin hedefi on 12th December 2015.
At his Ankara meeting with an HDP delegation, Mesud Barzani, head of Iraq’s KBY (Kurdestan Regional Administration), is reported to have asked for all ditches to be filled as soon as possible, emphasizing that nobody is going to benefit from the shattering of the peace and the transition to a war situation. During the meeting he is also said to have shared an anecdote about how, during the conflict with the Baghdad government, they wanted to capture a certain city, but his father Mustafa Barzani blocked the move, saying that “it would be a strategic mistake, for entering and occupying a place you cannot then defend harms both the people living there and the occupiers.”
And indeed, the way of the ditches is a dead-end street. Before and after, and to the right and left of the ditches there lie only death, devastation and destruction. Nevertheless the PKK is bent on having them. It is not taking even one step back from turning the Kurdish provinces into uninhabitable molehills. Kandil appears to have shunted civilian politics to a side-track, turning its back on all the gains acquired through democratic struggle. But why? Three possible answers come to mind.
“Liberated areas”
1. The PKK could be thinking that eventually the ditches will bring it success. Today they have a sufficient number of militants in the cities, and obviously they have also stockpiled enough ammunition to keep fighting against the government. The PKK might have two objectives in creating “liberated regions” that the government cannot enter. The first is a display of power: to show that it is they who rule the region. The second is to provoke the government into overreacting, and then to organize an uprising based on the mass anger this is likely to create.
2. The PKK may be wanting to duplicate its Syrian experience in Turkey. Riddling the places where the HDP got above 80 or even 90 percent of the votes with ditches and declaring them to be self-governed can have nothing to do with liberating or emancipating them. The objective has to be to create a chaotic internal conflict situation similar to Syria from which to derive maximum gain. The gains in question have nothing to do with the Kurds but only with the PKK. Indeed, for some time now, the gap between Kurdish rights and the PKK’s organizational interests has been getting wider, and the PKK is promoting its own interests.
3. By carrying the war to the cities, the PKK may be hoping to embarrass the government so as to bend it to its will over two points: Accepting its domain of power in Syria, and agreeing to return to the negotiation table, where PKK would be holding a much stronger hand.
Who is entitled to live in Kurdestan?
Of course, given the current state of the Middle East and the alliances which the PKK has entered into, other and more complicated possibilities can be added. But whatever the reasons, it is clear that the ditches are very important for the PKK. It sees them as a central move for attaining its objectives in this new era. That is why it reacts so strongly to anyone who ventures to criticize them. Those who say that digging ditches is wrong, whether they are from the HDP like Altan Tan, or non-partisan like Tahir Elçi, are very harshly accused in the PKK media, which have so far as to assert that “Those who criticize the PKK have no right to live in Kurdestan.”
Actually, the extent of this reaction attests to just how wrong this policy is. The PKK wants to prevent people from questioning its strategy, from noting its mistakes and talking about them. But this is not possible, for in Mücahit Bilici’s words, this is “self-destruction, not self-government.” What the PKK should do is not to silence but to heed these critiques in order to renounce this deadly mistake that is now turning into self-destruction.