They want to crush and destroy hope

The photographs of our citizens leaving the southeastern towns of Cizre and Silopi before the curfew started; what did these pictures remind you of? Is there any difference from the images we saw in the starting days of the Syrian civil war? 

Because the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has seized the keys to the cars of whoever owns one, they are leaving the town they live in on foot.

Thousands of people had to leave their lives with a few pieces of their belongings stuffed into bags they could carry. Some of them surely have a place to go; they may take shelter in close relatives’ houses, their friends or their acquaintances. For those who do not have such means, it is unsure where they will take shelter. 

There is only one reason for this outlook: It is the wish of the PKK to bring the war to another stage with the declaration of self-administration and to spread the war to urban areas. 

The population has become miserable for this reason; innocent people are dying and they don’t really care.

This organization does not care either that they are losing numerous young militants during their “self-administration” period, the one they declared by digging ditches on the streets, by building barricades, by using the houses inhabited by people as military positions by knocking down shared walls. 

Nor do they care about the martyred police and soldiers.

They are engaged in a contemptible plot of using the people living in the region as obligatory human shields. They indeed know that this will lead nowhere and that with this move they will not gain anything. 

 What they want is to smash and shatter the will of the two peoples to live together in democracy.

They want to destroy and crush the democratic hope created by the election victory of the Democratic Peoples’ Party (HDP) in June.

They know that as long as democratic politics hold out, then there will be no place for the warlords in Kandil. They are involved in the rush of strengthening their positions by taking advantage of the developments in the region. They do not care a bit about lost lives, destroyed historic places, wretched cities.

They have come up with a “self-administration” in which none of the people participate; they have no issue but to smash the hopes of Kurds for the future.

Right time for ‘peace process’ 

No “state” anywhere in the world does not and cannot tolerate a movement that is trying to invade certain cities by armed struggle in a part of its country. Doing this is giving up on its sovereignty on certain parts of the country’s soil.

In Turkey also, the state indeed does not and should not tolerate such a thing. However, while doing this, it should not forget that it is a state; the source of its legitimacy is its constitution and laws.

The state is responsible for the lives of those who live in those cities that have each been transformed into war zones. 

It should be the state’s priority to distinguish between the guilty and the innocent, and protect the innocent.

Writing racist slogans on the walls, announcements with swears, celebrating with gunfire, causing the death of civilian by randomly firing damage the legitimate actions of the state.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, with the drive to become an executive president, put the peace process in “the fridge.” Now is exactly the right time to take it out of there.

The only way to marginalize this organization is to make the democratic initiatives promised to the people of the region.

People’s freedom and democracy demands should not be sacrificed to the temper of a terror organization.