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The AKP party and its flip flop Kurdish
policy
10.10.2012
By Dr. Aland Mizell
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Ekurd.net
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Turkish Prime Minister Recep ayyip Erdogan addresses
on February 28, 2012 lawmakers of his ruling
Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Photo: Getty Images.
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Read more
By Dr. Aland Mizell
October
10, 2012
The AKP Party and its Flip Flop Kurdish Policy: The
Organic Ties of the PKK and the BDP, the Syrian
Crisis, and a New Brand of Islam in the Region.
The Turkish government insists that the Kurdish
problem and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) are
different entities and do not have any organic ties;
therefore, they argue that no such unified problem
but only disjointed problems about terrorism exist
and thus should be treated separately. Consequently,
the only way to eliminate terror is to kill the
terrorists, which Turkey has been doing for more
than three decades.
If Turkey still continues to believe that there are
no organic ties between the Kurdish problem and the
PKK, then why did this ongoing problem even start
and why is it heating up again now? How can they
stop innocent people from being killed on both
sides? This kind of approach is the continuation of
an assimilation policy and the denial of the Kurdish
people, facts which started this armed struggle for
Kurds to be recognized and for the Turkish
government to give them their seized social,
political, and natural rights.
If Turkey wants to have genuine peace, Ankara will
talk and listen to those who cause the problem and
find a middle way to solve it. If the Turkish
government is to sanctify the regime’s views on the
Kurds and make sure the Kurdish people will be
silent, then how can the Kurds accept peace?
Intolerance is itself a form of violence, an
obstacle to the Kurdish and Turkish peace process,
and also an obstacle to the growth of a truly
democratic process.
The Middle East region has been witnessing great
changes starting with the Arab Spring, and Turkey
wants to have an active role in the change; it
believes the rebels will easily topple the Assad
regime in Syria and replace it with a
Turkish-friendly Sunni regime and thereby control
the Kurds in Syria. Today Turkey’s foreign policy in
the Middle East is about dividing and ruling, based
totally on a religious-ethnic- sectarian policy.
Turkey does not accept the sovereignty of Iraq yet
hosts the Sunni Vice President of Iraq, Tariq al-Hashemi,
who was sentenced to death in Iraq, and Tariq al-Hashemi,
who supports the Syrian opposition.
Turkey is supporting extremist groups inside Iraq
(Sunnis and Turkmen) and Syria (opposition groups),
which is the main reason for the deterioration of
the relationship between the two countries
demonstrating sectarian plans for the Middle East.
Turkey is transferring people from various countries
including, Chechnya, Libya, Pakistan, Tunisia and
other Muslim countries to Syria to fight this battle
and to create security challenges for Iraq and
Syria. As a result of this policy, Turkish political
parties have been divided, such as the CHP and the
BDP, with some Islamic groups and leftists
supporting the Assad regime and going against the
Prime Minister’s policy to support Syrian opposition
groups. Prime Minister Erdogan claims that the Assad
regime is cruel in killing its people and in
committing crimes against humanity, and, therefore,
he must step down, a deposing that is in the
national interest of Turkey.
Those who do not support the Prime Minister’s view
claim the Arab Spring is a Western project to
destroy Islam and to replace their version of a
modern, peaceful Islam with the West rather than to
maintain a traditional anti-West position. For
example, Fethullah Gulen’s brand of Islam claims to
be a tolerant, peaceful religion, and America and
the West see it as this as well as not being
anti-Israel or anti-America. Yet in its true
ideology, this movement is against all that the
West, specifically America, represents.
The minorities in Syria, such as Christians, are
supporting the Assad regime, and they are worried
about the new Fundamental Sunni government supported
by Saudi Arabia and some Gulf countries. The
minority Kurdish people are neutral, neither
supporting Assad nor denouncing the Assad regime;
however, the Turkish government is accusing the
Kurdish minority there of supporting the Assad
regime because we all know the new Greater Middle
East Project there will not be under the Assad
regime. Turkey’s main concern after the Assad regime
is gone is the possibility of seeing another
autonomous Kurdish region, like the KRG in Iraq, in
Syria and consequently views it as a threat for
Turkey.
If Turkey and the PKK had talked to each other and
had some kind of peace, the Assad regime would be
gone by now; the PKK, PYD, BDP and AKP would support
each other; and many innocent lives would not have
been killed. As a result of the arrogance of the
Turkish government’s policies, innocent Kurdish
people, Syrian people, and Turkish people have paid
the price. The Turkish government hesitated to
intervene alone in Syria and wanted the support of
NATO, the US, and Western countries. Russia, China,
and Iran, however, are against Western military
intervention in Syria. As result of these changes,
the Kurds are now an important power in the Middle
East, and without the Kurdish people the Greater
Middle East Project will be disastrous.
The Turkish government tries to dehumanize the PKK,
especially using the current violence in Turkey:
1)to get the support of the public; 2) to promote
the idea of the PKK as dehumanized people or brutes;
3) to silence the media not to give balanced and
accurate news about the government and the PKK; and
4)to get financial and diplomatic support from
around the world. The more Assad stays in power, the
more the Kurdish people will reorganize themselves
in Syria becoming more powerful, and this causes
concern for Turkey. Even if Turkey takes over the
Kurdish minority in Syria, causing the Kurds in
Syria and the Kurds in Turkey to join together,
still the winner is the Kurds.
For Turkey there is only one option and that is to
sit down with the BDP and the PKK to talk to them;
otherwise, the war is lost for both sides, but peace
can be the winner Turkey must first respect the
existence of a Kurdish nation. If Turkey wants a
long-term peace with the Kurdish people and wants to
be a truly democratic nation, then it should
distribute democracy equally, not imposing a
selective democracy. Turkey should seek answers with
the PKK and the BDP about what is causing the
conflict.
Turkey again started to discuss the abolition of
immunity for democratically elected BDP deputies for
their friendly talk with PKK members. Prime Minister
Erdogan is using new methods; instead of closing
down the party, the ruling administration is putting
the party members in jail, so that they will not
form another party. If they close the BDP,www.ekurd.net
it is not good for Erdogan because he was a victim
of the same policy in the past. Erdogan knows that
if they close it, they will form another one, and it
will be more powerful, so instead of prohibiting the
party, the government is lifting the immunities of
those expelled from Parliament. Since the party
cannot function without its members, Ankara wants to
put the members in jail.
This raised the functionality of competitive party
politics in the democratization process. If the
function of the BDP party in a democracy is to be
representatives of the Kurdish people, and more than
two and half million Kurdish people have voted for
them to safeguard their interests in the Parliament,
then they have a right to criticize the government;
it counts very much for awareness among the people.
If democracy is to be preserved as viable mode of
governance, then the opposition party must
fearlessly perform its roles and duties and question
the government, holding them accountable to the
public. They should ensure that the government does
not take any steps which might have negative
implications for the people that voted for them.
Today the BDP party is the fourth largest party and
the only Kurdish party that represents Kurdish
interests in the Turkish Parliament.
The question is: will the Turkish Prime Minister now
solve the Kurdish issue with dialogue? The answer is
no. If Turkey is not going to solve the Kurdish
issue via dialogue and instead continues to see the
Kurdish issue as a terror issue, then the entire
country cannot have peace. Without peace Turkey will
not have an independent foreign policy in the region
and cannot maintain its leadership. Turkey has a
flip flop policy toward the Kurdish issues. A couple
of months ago, the Turkish Prime Minister admitted,
“I will not meet the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and
its leader Abdullah Oçalan. The Prime Minister
changed his opinion, and now he is saying, “If
needed I will talk to both Oçalan and the PKK, but I
will not speak to the BDP,” an amazing rejection
since the party is the fourth largest party in the
Turkish Parliament, democratically elected, and
committed to represent the Kurdish interests.
Furthermore, the Turkish government is trying to
abolish some of the BDP deputies’ immunity for
talking to PKK members.
If the Prime Minister says he will talk to the PKK
if needed, then why is he abolishing the immunity of
the deputies of the BDP who live in the region and
represent the interests of the Kurdish people? He
also knows that the BDP is a political wing of the
PKK. Why cannot he talk to them? Also, in the past
the Prime Minister asked the PKK if instead of
remaining on the top of the mountain killing people
and using violence, they would come down as allies
to defend their rights in a democratic way. I do
agree with that suggestion of the Prime Minister,
that the PKK should solve the Kurdish issue
politically, not using violence, but the Prime
Minister contradicted himself. He does not talk to
those who were democratically elected by more than
two and half million Kurds.
The question is: why is it so hard for the Turkish
government, politicians , and some public to accept
the Kurdish problem? The Turkish government and the
Turkish people are too proud and thus are not ready
to sit down and talk to the BDP and the PKK to solve
this issue in a democratic way. Continuing to
dehumanize the PKK , the BDP, and more than two and
a half million is not a good method to solve the
Kurds’ problems.
What is the government trying to do to solve the
Kurdish issues? The Prime Minister wants to change
the Constitution, to introduce a presidential
system, and to have a strong centralized government,
before they accept a Kurdish semiautonomous region
like in the Ottoman era. Since Erdogan does not have
power as of now to do all these changes, he wants to
have a strong presidential system, to get more
votes, as much as he wants, because the more that
vote, the more powerful he is. Erdogan knows the
Turkish public is not ready for him to talk about
the PKK and the BDP because he does not want to
jeopardize his plan for 2014. If he talks to the PKK,
the number of votes he receives might decrease, and
that is why he does not vote or sit at a negotiation
table.
Are Erdogan and Gulenists going to support more
Kurdish parties against the BDP, weaken the BDP, and
support the Kemal Burkay Party against the BDP?
Gulenists have infiltrated their people into the new
Kemal Buraky party against the BDP party. The
meaning of all this is that Erdogan is not ready to
solve the Kurdish issue via dialogue and instead has
flip flopped with the Kurdish issue being the main
obstacle for a strong Turkey in the region. Turkey
should extradite the fugitive Vice-President and
stop using the sectarian policy in the region . It
is the government’s duty to look at relations in its
society and to create appropriate political and
societal relations and to find the solutions to the
Kurdish problems, so that external powers will not
interfere.
Dr. Aland Mizell is with the University of
Mindanao School of Social Science, President of the
MCI and a regular contributor to the Kurdish Media.
You may reach the author via email at:
aland_mizell2@hotmail.com
Copyright
© 2012 Ekurd.net
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