What comes next?

The Turkish original of this article was published as

Sonra ne olur? on 11th August 2015.

 

What comes next? Whatever it is that happens in the case of all ethnic conflicts.

 

After a while, the question of just who resumed the conflict, and how, comes to be relegated to the background. As the two sides keep providing their own explanations of how things came to this point, they are not met with any meaningful objections from a majority of their supporters. The voices of those who truly want peace recede into the distance while war drums start booming louder and louder.

 

A past full of pain and sorrow, held at arm’s length during the Solution Process, is revived yet again. Positive memories of the truce are suddenly reduced to zero. The entire sociology behind it turns even more disadvantageous than before.

 

Security questions and policies become paramount. The whole situation becomes more conducive to policy-making interventions by the security establishment, including both the police and the army.  

 

And only when this death-lust has drunk enough blood to its satisfaction, and slowly pulls back to digest all the innocent lives that it has usurped, that in the midst of all the ruins once more it becomes time to talk and to take steps toward a solution.

 

With us, too, that is how it is going to be.

 

But with some differences.

 

* Its way partially lit by by the Oslo experience, the Solution Process had been going on as a purely domestic process. Recently, however, an upstart organization by the name of IS suddenly entered center-stage. As a result, it became possible for the US to achieve an even more influential position over both sides. What has further contributed to this development is the PKK’s re-launching of a new war, probably on the basis of new hopes stirred by the Syrian situation as well as Western hostility to Erdoğan. IS attacks have also made it possible for the US to become a party to the bilateral economic and political relations that have been growing ever more intensive between Iraqi Kurdestan and Turkey. This is a new reality, which entails accepting the entry of the US into the picture as a third party to any “solution,” regardless of how undesirable that prospect might be.  

 

* Having achieved a total hegemony over the people during the de facto truce (through violence and the threat of violence, tax collecting, setting up parallel courts and voter-intimidation), the PKK will have to accept a new situation where all that will no longer be permitted. It will, of course, continue to exert a considerable influence. But at the same time, gone will be the days when the army and the police turned their heads and pretended not to see, and provincial governors refused to authorize any operations. Instead, it will have to abide by a new setting where its attempts to impose its authority are likely to be met with effective counter-measures going hand in hand with the Solution Process. The pro-HDP pressure that the PKK has been exerting over voters and voting booths will no longer be tolerated.   

 

* The HDP for its part is also likely to retain a lot of its current power and influence, though no longer as a political actor capable of imparting hope in a “New Life” to both Kurds and non-Kurds, hence also an aspirant to the role of the main opposition. Instead, it will be reduced to just another apparatus of limited efficacy to be used to promote either armed conflict or negotioations as the need may be. In fact, this is what has already largely happened.

* The new situation is also likely to be one where some old advantages are no longer valid. Presently the CHP is insisting on the Solution Process being conducted by the National Assembly. The CHP has actually made this into a coalition condition. This means that the CHP intends to keep using the MHP to disembarrass itself of the Solution Process. The CHP’s Kemalist priorities do not allow for a constitution that will be entail the ideological neutrality of the state, the right to education in one’s mother language, and an equal, supra-ethnic citizenship. Hence for the National Assembly to be in the driver’s seat for the Solution Process would mean that the AKP and the HDP would no longer be able to agree on these three key points and take their common formulation to a referendum. (And while all this is so obvious, why would the HDP maintain such a complimentary attitude vis-à-vis the CHP; why would it work so hard to ensure that the CHP has a foot in government; why would it announce that to that end, it is even willing to consider providing outside support to a CHP-MHP coalition — that is a separate problem that political psychology has to deal with.)

 

*          *          *

 

Sometimes events develop so much outside your control that while you may be able to see where they are heading and what is likely to happen after a few more steps, you are powerless to prevent it. It’s like being in a bad dream, a nightmare where you cannot escape the march of events. That is precisely what is happening today. 

 

We have once more embarked upon a painful path, and when common sense returns we shall all witness that where we whave arrived will not be any improvement on where we are today.

 

But unfortunately, today it is the death urge that holds sway..

 

What we are presently witnessing on television screens are pro-Kurdish commentators, so-called, i.e. journalists and academics given to agreeing with the PKK and the HDP under all conditions and circumstances, who are lustily “analyzing” the course of events and who mean war even when they say peace. Then on the other side there are also “realistic” know-alls who begin with “hadn’t we told you that this terrorist organization could not be trusted,” and who go on to ruminate on “the geo-political and geo-strategic situation surrounding our country.” What is interesting is that both groups should be arriving at the same conclusion albeit through totally opposed arguments.

  

The Solution Process was, and still is, the most serious peace opportunity ever faced by this country over the last ninety years. Especially when the most important obstacles had been surmounted, and when virtually all that remained was for the two parties to agree on the necessary constitutional amendments to be jointly taken to a referendum, it is all the more ttragic to have to suffer what we are now suffering.

 

Actually, what has to be done is absolutely clear: The PKK must put an end to its armed actions on Turkish soil, and through a healthy assessments of all the other mistakes committed during the Solution Process, that process has to be advanced and brought to a conclusion. 

 

All I can hope for is, before it has been able to swallow many more lives, to be able to exit this malevolent vortex.  

 

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