Fréderike Geerdink
It’s been a month of complicated developments in Turkey. It started early this month, during the opening of the parliamentary year: an ultra-nationalist leader shook the hand of DEM Party MPs, his arch enemies. October was concluded with the arrest of Ahmet Özer, the Kurdish CHP mayor of İstanbul’s Esenyurt municipality, who is being accused of having ties with terrorism. Two seemingly totally contradictory events. What does the state want, one might ask: peace with the Kurds, or war with the Kurds? The factions in the state don’t agree.
Factions within the state? This may sound weird because those are usually not the terms used when the state is being discussed. But I like to turn things upside down now and then to shed a light on developments and realities. The factions within the state are usually referred to as ‘political parties’. Calling them political parties gives the impression that they all have different solutions for Turkey’s problems. You may expect of them that they distinguish themselves, especially on issues that touch the core of the country. Say, the Kurdish issue.
Front
But on the Kurdish issue, they basically all agree and form a front. The established parties I mean, like AKP and MHP, which are in the coalition government, and the parties that are considered to be the opposition, like CHP, Zafer Partisi (Victory Party) and IYI Parti (Good Party). None of them has ever proposed any other solution to the Kurdish issue than to eradicate ‘terrorism’. Sure, both AKP and CHP have had periods in which they proposed democratisation as the way forward, but that was mainly inspired by, respectively, the will to strengthen presidential power or to win elections. I’m slightly simplifying, but this is what it boils down to.
These parties are all fierce supporters of the Republic of Turkey in its current form, which is extremely nationalist, militarist, putting the state’s interest above the individual’s interest, autocratic, racist. You could sum that up in one word: fascist. None of the parties has ever suggested to end fascism to solve the Kurdish issue.
Decade
They do tend to differ slightly in the way they want to suppress the opposition (another characteristic of fascism). Bombing the armed resistance movement to smithereens, that’s what all factions agree upon. They all call it ‘terrorism’, and the more ‘terrorists’ are ‘rendered ineffective’, the better. Less unified are the factions about locking up unarmed activists and politicians. They also don’t all agree on the tactic of replacing elected mayors by ‘trustees’ and throwing the elected mayors in jail. The faction’s positions, however, may shift depending on which activist it is and to which faction they belong, and on the political realities of the decade, month or day.
This is basically what is playing out this month. How shall we suppress PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan? By proposing to hang him, by keeping him jailed indefinitely, or by ridiculing him by suggesting he comes to parliament to declare the ‘end of terrorism’ and parrot the state’s deepest wish? How shall we give the Kurds the impression that we are willing to listen to their demands? By shaking their elected representatives’ hands, by visiting their biggest city in the southeast of the country but without making concrete proposals, or by suggesting their ultimate leader can speak in parliament without giving him actual freedom of speech?
Israel
Erdoğan is struggling, I have heard from several commentators this month. He wants to get the Kurds on his side. In general, two reasons are mentioned for this. First is that he wants to run for president for the 3rd time and needs Kurdish parliamentary support for the required constitutional change. Second is that the Middle-East is on fire and he wants to unite the country, for example against his latest delusion which is that Israel is out to occupy parts of Turkey.
But now, the Kurds are divided! The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has factions! The PKK attack in Ankara, on 23 October, shows that clearly, commentators claim. After all, the AKP-MHP government is looking for rapprochement with the Kurds, has finally allowed Öcalan to receive a family visit, and shook Kurdish MP’s hands, and now the PKK is throwing a spanner in the works! This attack was clearly done, the logic is, by a faction within the PKK that doesn’t want to strike a deal with the state on Erdoğan’s terms.
Surrender
There are no such ‘factions’ within the PKK. They are a front. As the PKK already said in the statement with which they claimed the attack in Ankara: the attack didn’t have anything to do with the freshest political developments. This makes sense. Such an attack requires quite some preparation and can’t be organised in two weeks. It was instead part of the ongoing war, since 1984, between the PKK and the state – the war against all the factions within the state that keep supporting fascism.
It’s only logical that there is discussion within the armed movement about the best approach to secure the democratisation that is needed to end the armed struggle once and for all. But to think there is a ‘faction’ that wants to strike a deal on Erdoğan’s terms, is, frankly, absurd – and that they would communicate with one another via an attack on a military target in Ankara, is too. A deal on Erdoğan’s terms would mean surrender. The PKK doesn’t surrender.
Radical
It is Erdoğan himself who is throwing a spanner in the works. The AKP-MHP faction within the state, I should say. After all, if the AKP-MHP faction wants to win the Kurds over for one reason or another, it should consider stopping being a state faction and propose a radical solution. Stop bombing Kurdish lands in Turkey, Iraq and Syria, for starters. Get the negotiating table from the dungeons of the palace and invite Öcalan and the leadership in Qandil to it. Be transparent and give power to parliament. Invite an independent third actor to oversee the process.
Stop being merely a faction of the state.
Fréderike Geerdink is an independent journalist. Follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her acclaimed weekly newsletter Expert Kurdistan.
