Over the past two years, as the New York Times editors have repeatedly huffed and puffed about Turkey’s political leadership, a constant source of entertainment has been imagining where the editors are getting their “information” from.
That disastrous decision to publish a ghost-written editorial from Fethullah Gülen (“Turkey’s Eroding Democracy,” 3 February 2015) probably exposed what was going on, but some question marks nevertheless remained. So, contemplating who is whispering “bitter nothings” about Turkey into the NYT editors’ ears is still important if we want to understand more completely how they got themselves into this situation.
Subsequently, another NYT op-ed on Turkey, now more than three weeks old (1), provides more clues for analysis. The author, Abdullah Demirbaş, is the former mayor of Sur, a working-class Diyarbakır neighborhood that is among those most heavily affected by the current violence between the PKK and the Turkish state. The PKK has been “occupying” various district centers to set up ditches and barricades, and create fox-warrens of “defence,” against which the security forces have been moving in to clean up. In essence, the editors thought that going to a prominent voice from the conflict zone would provide suitably one-sided rhetoric against the state.
Demirbaş’s op-ed is not a totally new innovation for the NYT. In late 2014, during the Kobane crisis, the NYT took the extraordinary (and ethically questionable) step of publishing an editorial from a PYD militant (“A Town Shouldn’t Fight the Islamic State Alone: Turkey’s Obstruction of Kobani's Battle Against ISIS,” 28 October 2014). Imagine the NYT allowing a figure from the IRA to explain, on their editorial page, how their glorious armed struggle against the British state was going. Envision an ETA militant discussing, in a NYT op-ed, how their violent campaign against the Spanish state is (was) justified by the oppression they face(d). Did the NYT let “Che” Guevara write any opinion pieces for them? Those would be equivalent to what the NYT did on 28 October 2014 when they allowed a PYD militant to pen an anti-Turkish editorial for the day’s edition. For the PYD is the Syrian arm of the PKK.
Demirbaş is not supposed to be a militant, though. At least not at first sight. He is a proven politician and activist who was a victim of the infamous “KCK case,” which was apparently instigated by Fethullah Gülen’s minions in the Turkish police. Most recently, Demirbaş was again arrested in August for offenses related to “anti-terror” laws, and imprisoned for more than a month until he was released for health reasons. While recuperating, Demirbaş was interviewed by the BBC and the Wall Street Journal, and the U.S. Consul-General in Adana visited him in hospital. (2)
Since then, Demirbaş has appeared on IMC TV in December 2015, which is known for being a militant opposition channel (thought to be close to the PKK). He has been associated with the “Barış Blok” (Peace Bloc) activist group, which routinely provides apologist rhetoric for PKK violence. He has also tweeted in support of the PYD.
In his NYT article, Demirbaş writes in a carefully crafted way to appeal to the liberal sentiments of his intended audience; twice he refers to the ethnic and religious pluralism cultivated in Sur over the past six or seven years. This is excellent except for one strategic omission: the tolerance that he describes was not limited to Sur, and cannot be attributed to the PKK’s dominating outlook. In fact, all of Turkey’s minorities across the country have benefited from the political reforms and changing bureaucratic mentalities initiated by the government over the past decade.
That is not Demirbaş’s only strategic omission. He spends several paragraphs narrating the current (or recent) situation in Sur, casting the youth caught up in the violence as naïve victims. Then he appeals for peace using terms that his readers are likely to find admirable. But again, he entirely neglects a vitally important detail: it is the PKK and its youth branch, the YDG-H (Yurtsever Devrimci Gençlik-Hareket, or Patriotic Revolutionary Youth-Movement) which are entirely responsible for the current situation. They are purposefully, consciously choosing violence to pursue their militant goals. They are the ones “occupying” various town centres (and challenging the security forces to come and clear them out) in the name of establishing “self-government.”
More importantly, the PKK’s leadership, and the HDP politicians who behave as the PKK’s minions by refusing to reject violence as a political option, are most culpable for the current round of violence. Simply, Kurdish political leaders – actually armed or not – must take responsibility for their words and actions. Lives are at stake. The immediate future of Turkey’s Kurds is also at stake: can Kurdish politicians embrace democratic politics, and allow their potential constituents to build a future free of the threat of violence? This is what Demirbaş should have said in his editorial. Instead, in the second paragraph of his op-ed, Demirbaş prefers to gloss over the fact that it was the PKK that unilaterally re-started the fighting last July. Instead he uses the oft-repeated euphemism about a “breakdown of the talks.” It seems that Demirbaş recognizes the reality of the situation, but cannot bring himself to pronounce it. Near the end of his column, he includes this paragraph:
Dialogue is possible when those in power want it. Last spring, the two sides were on the verge of a breakthrough after two and a half years of negotiations. The Kurds, when given a real and fair choice, have repeatedly picked politics over violence and opted for coexistence in a democratic Turkey, where their rights and identities are recognized, over separation. But as the destruction goes on, their faith in a political solution withers.
That paragraph refers only to “the Kurds,” and not the PKK (or its umbrella organization, the KCK). Furthermore, “a real and fair choice” does exist for the Kurds in general. That’s exactly why so many of Turkey’s Kurds voted for the AKP in the November 2015 election. That’s exactly why there are now dozens of Kurdish politicians in the Turkish parliament. That’s exactly why tens of thousands of Kurds, disgusted with and fearful of the PKK’s refusal to reject violence, have fled that militant organization’s self-proclaimed “autonomous regions,” effectively voting with their feet. The PKK is, for the first time, losing its support amongst the Kurdish population in Turkey, who long ago recognized that the time for violence had passed.
The NYT, by allowing itself to be used as a platform for Kurdish militancy, has aided and abetted the violence coming from that sector of Turkish politics. This is shameful and unethical. Individuals and the general public in Western Europe and North America, generally on the left side of the political spectrum, need to lose their romantic attachment to violent Kurdish militancy as soon as possible. The political situation in Turkey has changed dramatically, and the possibility of peaceful democratic struggle for rights and liberties for Kurds is now fully attainable. The era of violence, as Abdullah Öcalan himself announced on Newroz in 2013, is over.
NOTES
(1) 26 January 2016, “Undoing Years of Progress in Turkey” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/25/opinion/undoing-years-of-progress-in-turkey.html?ref=opinion . According to tweets on Demirbaş’s twitter account, Karabekir Akkoyunlu, an assistant professor at the University of Graz, helped Demirbaş compose this column.
(2) All these events are detailed in his twitter account.