"Government institutions cannot cause discrimination by announcing a part of the public as their friend, while denouncing the rest as an enemy," he said. I believe this is a sentence that has the ability to transform the design and mentality of the government. Up until now many groups and ideologies were seen as posing a threat to the regime. They were perceived as being an enemy, and fighting against them was seen as a responsibility. There is something called "autoimmunity" in medicine. As anyone familiar with medicine would know, autoimmunity poses a great threat to the body. It is the failure of an organism to recognize its own parts, resulting in an immune response against its own cells and tissues. We all know that the human body has a natural defense system to fight germs which protects the body by fighting foreign substances. But when in a state of autoimmunity, the defense system is activated against its own organs and starts fighting them. The system sees the organ as an enemy and attacks it. It is inevitable that this situation leads to fatal results. Even if a body survives, it will have lost great strength.
Turkey's autoimmunity, in which its own constituent parts are seen as an enemy and are fought against, will do nothing more than make the country too exhausted to be concerned with anything else.
The impression I got from Kılıç's statement is that Turkey's government cannot get into a state of autoimmunity. It cannot denounce a segment of its own society as an enemy. If it does, then it will pose a great threat both to the country's health and to the modern legal system. Looking at it from this perspective, Turkey needs to re-examine the frequently used rhetoric of "domestic and foreign enemies" and restructure the government accordingly. A lengthy discussion of Turkey's understanding of a threat would yield positive results.
The efforts and statements of Chief of General Staff Gen. İlker Başbuğ on the southeast issue are very important in this respect. He, so to speak, completely reversed the perception in the Southeast of the government being mean and abusive. He conversed with an old man in Van and gave the impression that he was a commander who embraced the public and has continued in the same vein. Take for example, how he visited the corps commander of the region where a young boy was beaten by a police officer with the butt of his rifle, on the grounds that he threw stones at the security forces in Hakkari. This step should be seen as a continuation of the same policy. Although nine soldiers were killed by the terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) on the day Başbuğ held a press conference, his determination to maintain this stance will play an important role in resolving problems.
Developing a new discourse against the mistakes of the government, Başbuğ is taking a historic step and reshaping the way the government perceives the Southeast. All those who said they were protecting the regime of Turkey only fought with its internal constituents. Kurds, religious people, socialists, etc., were all seen as enemies of the state. Turkey must escape its autoimmunity because this sickness has left it exhausted.
