A psychological initiative and a unitary state

On Tuesday, which is also World Peace Day, the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) will organize a peace parade in Diyarbakır with a concrete show of its position toward the process along with strong popular participation. Although Atalay has yet to make public his agenda and the DTP will disclose with a massive demonstration the stance adopted by Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Öcalan, who is in jail on the island of İmralı, the democratization process known as the Kurdish initiative has already started and is under way.

Moreover, this is not a freshly started process. Allowing Kurdish language courses, recognizing the Kurdish language officially and making it a language of broadcasting with the introduction of the state-owned Turkish Radio and Television Corporation's (TRT) Kurdish language broadcasting channel TRT Şeş, maintaining a cool-headed stance in the face of moves to change place names altered during the cruel military rule of 1980 back to their originals, discussing the opening of Kurdish language departments at the general assembly meetings of the Higher Education Board (YÖK), the start of airing advertisements in Kurdish on TV and radio stations, releasing without trial PKK militants who have surrendered and who did not commit any offense and many other novel developments are proof that the process has already started and made some significant progress.

Yes, but why then do we still say a democratic initiative process will begin? There is one simple reason for this. Even if you solve the problems created by democratic inadequacy one by one, the relaxation desired cannot be obtained unless you sufficiently and correctly explain these to the people and the groups that are victims of this democratic in adequacy. In other words, while you undertake radical reforms with democratic initiatives, you have to manage the perceptions and psychology of the people about these reforms. Otherwise, even the most radical and the most democratic reforms, those that raise human rights and freedoms to the highest level, may not lead to the desired results regarding the establishment of social peace and the protection of the country's integrity. The current democratic initiative process is important in terms of creating such a social psychology by turning a new page over the errors of the past.

In other words, the democratic initiative, which aims to destroy psychological barriers between Kurds and Turks, is in a sense a psychological initiative rather than a political, economic or cultural one. For this reason, every act, action, attitude or word that would cast a shadow on the psychology of coexistence that this initiative aims to bring about is recorded as an action that targets destruction the country's integrity. The opposition parties, the Republican People's Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), which have been censuring the process in the harshest manner since the beginning and which even went so far as to accuse the National Security Council (MGK) and the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) of treason, should view the process from this perspective. Otherwise, it is very likely that they themselves are committing the grave offense of treason, of which they accuse the government, the president, the MGK and the TSK.

I would like to touch upon a technical error which we frequently hear these days. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, CHP leader Deniz Baykal, MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli and Chief of General Staff Gen. İlker Başbuğ feel the need to stress that "no concession for the unitary structure of the country will be made" whenever they talk about the democratic initiative process. Outsiders may have difficulty in understanding why a simple and technical administrative structure is regarded so sacrosanct. "When you preserve the national unity, territorial integrity and peace, what difference will the administrative system's being unitary or federal make?" they might ask.

I must note this: Whenever our civilian leaders or military commanders refer to a "unitary structure," please take this as opposition not to federalism, but to the division of the country. This is because what our politicians and commanders mean with "unitary" is nothing but the integrity of the country. That said, if settlement requires other administrative formulas, why then should Turkey remain necessarily unitary? If needed, it may discuss a federal system or adopt a decentralized administration. Otherwise, this means that we lag far behind the level of political mentality of the late President Turgut Özal, who had boldly sparked debates on federalism and decentralization in the early 1990s, and this would be unfair for the level of Turkey's intellectual and political development. For this reason, it is a grave error to close the doors to the debates on federation in advance by making the unitary system, an antithesis of federalism, a political fetish. Luckily, those who insist on a "unitary structure" do not actually mean anti-federalism.

"States may adopt diverse administrative forms in order to establish or maintain their territorial integrity. There are three forms of administrative structure: a unitary state, a federation and a confederation [with no known example today]," says Şahin Alpay in the Zaman daily and, as he stressed, a "unitary state" is never the only way to establish or maintain territorial integrity. Even if a country's administrative texture is unitary, this does not have to be a centralized structure, as in Turkey, which turns a blind eye to diversity and even destroys it. A system which requires referral to Ankara for the solution of a simple issue in Van, Diyarbakır, Edirne or Antalya proves to be insufficient in the face of the problems of the time which are to be solved swiftly.