The ‘Threats’ Building the Future

The tutelage system devised two internal threats, fought with them and sponged on them for years. They were pejoratively “reactionism and separatism” and politically “Islam and the Kurdish question”. The establishment believing that the 1980 military coup d’etat suppressed any political alternative adverse to the official ideology, did not hesitate to intervene – through the most primitive ways – in the formation of the two strongest trends of the republican history in the last decade. The tutelage regime engaged in a grim with both threats, especially in the 1990s, and took this fight to a further level – to a so-called post modern coup on February 28, 1997 – in order to eliminate the “reactionism threat”. However, the cost of the fight with the “separatism threat” was the terror of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and a huge devastation alongside. In the final analysis, the issue of why the on-going democratization process did not start 20-25 years ago begs an explanation. The spirit of time is of course a determinative factor; however, the answer to our question should be sought in why the central right or left parties failed to fight with the tutelage regime’s “internal threat” engineering.

The way of how the central right parties established relations with the institutions and the ideology of the tutelage system and how the central left parties with the structures of the political world prevented them from taking steps to achieve results. In other words, since the Kemalist political world was a common denominator to some degree, we kept seeing similar pictures of the Kurdish issue from the right or the left angles. The tutelage regime continued to stand still as the blood-shed caused by the PKK was added to this deadlock. Simply generated by the Kurdish issue, the Kurdish Movement, instead of becoming an address for a solution, evolved into being an aggrieved address reminding the vitality of the issue, but not able to tell Turkey anything at all. For being towed around by the PKK, the Movement has winded up its political maneuvering ability – mostly on its own.

The deadlock mentioned above had started to receive blows for the first time by the Refah Party leader then, the late Necmettin Erbakan’s timid moves still far from describing the issue. The Refah Party’s first ascent was observed in the Southeast region since the region was embodied by the said internal threats. The AK Party, having a Refah Party background, included suggestions about the possible solution of the Kurdish problem in its party program; therefore blazed a trail in the party’s tradition. It was both unexpected and difficult in many aspects to do politics in an area which is regarded as the area of “the other” while being associated with an “other” political movement in the eye of the establishment. This set an unprecedented example until the start of the AK Party period. Back in 2005, while Erdogan made his famous speech shaking the ground in Diyarbakir, he was subjected to coup threats, as we did learn so in the years to come. Similarly, the AK Party again was to launch the first solution process – a year after facing the closure case. The 2013 solution process progressed unexpectedly according to those who evaluated the AK Party only through parliamentary and election arithmetic rather than political engineering that the party conducted actually. Erdogan is to take a “3-election” turn with the arrival of 2014. He considerably invalidated the analyses over the Kurdish issue and took a pro-active step.

Judging from the scene revealed by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party), the paradigm has bankrupted and the transition to a new order has already begun since the world of friends and enemies who stood by the tutelage regime for years is totally confused now. After this stage, the only thing the system roughly holds in hand is nothing but a meaningless de facto