The ‘New Message’ and the Solution Process

The perpetrators of the 1980 military coup were convinced that any political movement against the official disquisition in Turkey was eliminated for good. The last thing they expected from the remnants of the bloody coup were the reappearances of ethnic or religious identities. However, almost the exact opposite of what they expected occurred. Before even a decade passed over the military overthrow, two strong political currents had already surfaced: Islamism, mostly by the will of the People, and the Kurdish nationalism, mostly as a result of the primitive pressures exerted by the military tutelage regime. Both gained strength and spread day by day. The 1990s became a period in which the military-judiciary tutelage, the Islamism and the Kurdish movement, all simultaneously, made it to the summit and were noted down as the lost years for Turkey. The Islamism transformed into a political structure appealing to entire Turkey. The Kurdish movement, however, confined itself to become a community movement in the narrowest sense, because of its ethnical structure, failure to give-up arms, its belated baggage of nationalism and the leftist-intellectual patronage over it. It became so narrowly confined that it even turned into a minimal representation of the Kurds.

Failure (of the Kurdish movement) to address the entirety of Turkey had a very high-cost. The Kurdish movement, in the last 30 years in particular, has never seemed to understand the fact that no singular political demand made in Turkey was able to win from the system what it desired. The equation, however, was not too complex. In totality, every actor who has contributed and supported the democratization of Turkey was also able to acquire the power to expand its own share of ground. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) strictly applied this quite simple recipe during its terms in office; therefore became the winning actor always. In this process, many demands by the AK Party grassroots were delayed and spread over time to be met. All of the delays caused aggravation of certain sects and therefore led to resumption of their rightful demands. However, the betterments for all the general public never changed direction. As Turkey made progress in democratization, some of the grievances were eliminated; and as for the unmet demands, the necessary ground was secured for continued efforts for change to fulfill them.

Today, those who ask –sincerely or ill-intentionally– “What will Kurds gain?” in the solution process, must understand that now the possibility of a similar ground to occur for the Kurds for the first time is insight. Therefore, those who are looking for the word “Kurd” to appear in the answer for the question above, are doomed for disappointment. In fact, the continued existence over decades of the aforementioned “Kurdish problem”, in a way to a great extend, stemmed from the attempts to make the democratization efforts uniquely focus on Kurds. Similarly, the establishment has managed to this date to live off the backs of those who look for the answer to the above question, creating grounds for itself to perpetuate. Belated Kurdish nationalism perhaps could not give anything to the Kurds, but it surely bestowed at least 20 years to the regime of tutelage for it to survive.

At this point, it is beneficial to remember Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s speech he delivered at Diyarbakır in 2005. Erdoğan underlined the fact that Turkey will not step back from the point where it did reach and that everyone should know that democracy will be felt by all citizens to a deeper level. “We will not let the democratization process be reversed… We are ready to listen to everyone who has something to say; we are ready to lend an ear to everyone who is cognizant of justice. You must never carry any doubts about this, so long as we get rid of the violence and fights that