Bottleneck days in the resolution process

The most important motor ahead of Turkey’s democratization and clearing the way for freedoms is no longer the European Union, but the “resolution process.”

And this motor has been running in idle mode for a while; the power in the engine is never able to be conveyed to the wheels; the vehicle does not move.

Well, yes, the vehicle has not gone back, nor has the motor stopped, but because of reasons I will try to explain later, it is never declutched and the engine is never in gear.

Actually, once the vehicle moves, its road and direction are evident. There is even a mutual agreement on this. However, both sides are waiting for the other to make confidence-building moves.

The expectation of the Kurdish side is, in the first phase, the forming of an independent committee named the “monitoring committee,” as well as “a secretariat for Abdullah Öcalan” and “new legal arrangements paving the way to returns.”  

All of these factors, as a matter of fact, have been agreed upon mutually, but for all these steps (and some other steps also) to be taken, the government has one pre-condition: The construction of public order.

Actually, the “forming of public order” contains further meanings beyond the simple “maintaining public order.” As Muhsin Kızılkaya analyzed for HaberTürk yesterday, the basic intention of this term is the guarantee that all components under the name “PKK,” the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, from now on, conduct politics in a democratic and legal platform and not resort to arms or other illegal methods.
This includes digging trenches in Cizre, blocking roads in Diyarbakır and setting up courts attempting to serve justice everywhere in the Kurdish geography.

For this reason, the phase has reached a serious junction for the PKK: Even if it does not lay down arms right now, it will declare when it will lay down arms and give or not give the assurance of ultimately abandoning being an armed organization.

Let me say it once more: Maybe the PKK does not need to disarm overnight, but it will or it will not give the assurance that it will disarm completely at one point during the process and conduct politics in democratic ways after.

This guarantee is anticipated.

Also a junction for the Kurdish political movement   

Kurds, with their population spread over four different countries, are the biggest stateless nation in the world.

This situation alone is an adequate justification for the Kurds to seek their own state, which they have been doing since World War 1, when Wilson principles were established.

Iranian Kurds are under one kind of federal administration; they can self-administrate, though partially. Iraqi Kurds, with their federal regions, stand one step away from independence. Under civil war circumstances in Syria, partial autonomy is seen but the situation is indefinite.

In Turkey, on the other hand, the situation is very different than the other three countries. Turkey considers by widening the democratic rights of the Kurds, including equal citizenship and strengthening local governments, it is possible to make Kurds feel in “their own country” without giving up its unitary structure; the “resolution process” is the search for this.

The developments both in Iraq and in Syria, unavoidably, influence the Kurdish political movement in Turkey; the “liberated zones” in Syria make it particularly difficult for the PKK to make a decision.
Frankly, the wider Kurdish political movement will have to decide between continuing being “Pan-Kurdish” and searching for its future together with Turkey.

In this respect, they are at a historic curve.

The Cizre test of the state’s reflexes

I hope Interior Minister Efgan Ala has drawn a series of conclusions for himself from the last Cizre incident. 

There, when a 14-year-old child died, the interior minister, with the “state reflex,” said, “Police were not even there;” his information sources, especially the police itself, were misleading him.

If it were in the past, that child’s death would remain an unresolved issue. Fortunately, the interior minister later acted prudently and sent inspectors to Cizre and, as a result, images came out revealing the police have committed that murder.

Let’s hope moving forward such provocations via the hand of the state do not occur and nobody dies.
But if it happens, the “state reflex” should not be guidance; the incident, whatever has happened, should be investigated to the end.