Fréderike Geerdink
Finally, PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan received a visitor in İmralı Prison: his nephew Ömer Öcalan, who is also an MP for the DEM Party, got permission to visit his uncle. It’s very good news and it’s clear that the ongoing campaigns of the Kurdish movement to demand access to Öcalan have yielded results. Then again, the state’s death culture is persistent and intensifying. As long as it does, the chance for peace is nil.
The intense debate about a possible new ‘peace process’ started when one of Turkey’s biggest fascists, MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli, extended his hand to DEM Party MPs at the opening of the parliamentary year, earlier this month. He said he wanted peace in the homeland for peace in the world, reminiscent of Atatürk’s famous quote. Sounds cool, but for Bahçeli, peace means obedience of all citizens to the state and the absence of resistance, not the ‘honourable peace’ the Kurdish movement is struggling for. Honourable peace is the kind of peace that is reached when people enjoy their full social, political, cultural and linguistic rights.
Voice
Then Bahçeli added a cherry to the pie. He said that Öcalan should be allowed to speak in parliament. Turkey went, in short, berserk. What a break-through! But really, it is not a break-through, it is the continuation of the decades-long policy of the state aiming to subdue the Kurdish legitimate struggle for freedom. Because of course, Bahçeli had some conditions. Öcalan wouldn’t have the right to speak freely in parliament but would have to announce the ‘end of terrorism’ and would have to declare the PKK abolished. Turkish-style freedom of expression, you could say. Öcalan would say words, but it wouldn’t be him speaking but the state’s fascist voice. Since Öcalan is not a fascist but a leftist revolutionary political thinker, this will never happen.
Something very dark happened after Bahçeli had made his comments. A politician of IYI Party, a split from Bahçeli’s MHP, nearly exploded with anger while he spoke to his parliamentary group and held a thick rope in the air, basically telling Bahçeli to hang himself. Bahçeli reacted by posing with a noose in which he ‘hanged’ the IYI Party, surrounded by Turkish nationalist symbols. It may seem like merely absurd theatre, but it says something about the way these men look at the world, accusing each other of being traitors and expressing that with nooses. Their ideology is about death and war, never about life and peace.
Ceasefire
Which brings me to the attack, Wednesday, on TUSAŞ in Ankara, as a result of which five people died and several were wounded. The HPG (the armed wing of the PKK) has claimed the attack. They said one civilian died, and apparently don’t count the four victims who worked for TUSAŞ as civilians. Logically, the attack is seen as an attempt to derail any possibly emerging road towards negotiations to solve the Kurdish issue via democratic means. Positive steps are being taken, people say, and the attackers are trying to wreck it already!
In its statement, however, the HPG said the attack was planned long ago and not connected to recent political developments in Turkey. This is logically true: you can’t organise such an attack quickly. And I’d like to add something. Is HPG breaking some kind of an agreed upon ceasefire that I miraculously hadn’t heard of? Of course not. They are involved in a continuous war against the Turkish state. Could TUSAŞ, which is a state-owned defence company involved in the production of weapons that are used against them, possibly be a legitimate target? I’m not drawing the conclusion that it was, but the option needs to be taken into account.
Even more so because TUSAŞ weapons are not just used against the PKK, as the HPG statement also said. Early this month, Turkey’s foreign minister Fidan said that ‘all infrastructure, superstructure and energy facilities that belong to the PKK and the YPG, especially in Iraq and Syria, are legitimate targets for our security forces, armed forces and intelligence units’. It’s definitely against international law to target civilian infrastructure, because that is what his words mean in practice: every road, every electricity pole, every water tank is considered to be ‘belonging to PKK and YPG’. Why? Simply because they are on lands under control of the defence forces that are led by Kurds who follow Öcalan’s ideology.
Kobani
If you want it more concrete: Turkey bombed a whole range of targets in both Iraq and Syria after the Ankara attacks, including grain silos, electricity stations, Kobani’s train station, security buildings. There is, from an international law perspective, zero doubt about the illegitimacy of the targets. Reportedly an unknown number of civilians died, possibly even more than died in the Ankara attack.
It annoys me deeply how established media report on all this. On the Ankara attack, everybody is just copying the state lingo of the attack in Ankara being ‘terrorism’ while that is not clear at all. On top of that, they report that Turkey retaliates by attacking ‘PKK positions in Iraq and Syria’. The PKK is not even in Syria, and attacking electricity stations and grain silos is a war crime, even more so when civilians are killed.
Dreams
Which brings me back to Bahçeli’s suggestion that Öcalan comes to parliament to parrot the state’s deepest wish. In his dreams! It’s not the PKK’s weapons that are the core of the problem, it’s the state’s violence. The PKK’s armed struggle started in the early 1980s as a reaction to brutal state violence and repression that has existed since the day the Turkish republic was founded. That is the core, and that needs to end. If that ends, the armed struggle will end too.
So maybe it’s a suggestion that Erdoğan and Bahçeli, maybe accompanied by CHP’s Özgür Özel because why not, travel to İmralı Prison and the Qandil mountains to declare an end to state terrorism and the dissolvement of the fascist state. Peace man!
Fréderike Geerdink is an independent journalist. Follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her acclaimed weekly newsletter Expert Kurdistan.
