All peaceful voices were silenced. They were imprisoned, tortured and killed. Just because they said there were Kurds in this country, that there was a Kurdish language and so on. In just the last 30 years, 13 political parties were closed down for their views and activities on the Kurdish question.The Turkish military relentlessly wrote “How happy is he who calls himself a Turk” on every mountain in every part of the Kurdish regions. Truncheons were inserted into people’s anuses, Kurdish inmates were forced to eat human excrement, they were forced to salute to dogs, they were put in cesspools, women were raped, discharged soldiers brought home “ear mascots” cut from the heads of Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) members.
Villages were destroyed and set on fire on a systematic basis. JİTEM was on patrol in every corner of southeastern Turkey, kidnapping and killing people in broad daylight. Everyone, even children, knew what JITEM was and what it was doing there. However, up until now the Turkish military has consistently denied its very existence.
This authoritarian father, of course, created his own psychopathic son. And its name was the PKK. The more furious Kurdish people became, the more members the PKK recruited. After all the Turkish state has done in the region, it is not difficult to understand how the PKK has turned into a huge organization. It’s a real pity Turks in the western part of the country have never tried to understand what happened in the Southeast; the only thing they saw were the dead bodies of the very soldiers they sent to this bloody war.
Alienation and anger have increased with every passing day. With every dead body discovered in the Southeast, Turks in the west became more and more angry. This anger was unleashed upon the Kurds as more brutality. While this vicious circle was hardening into stone, slowly and gradually the PKK has turned in the eyes of Kurds into an untouchable entity. Their hatred made them blind. They turn a blind eye to the widespread and extremely arbitrary extrajudicial executions of the PKK’s own militants, not to mention the PKK’s terrorist methods and its indiscriminate killings of civilians.
The PKK started its voyage as a Marxist Leninist armed opposition group and ended up as an extremely nationalist organization. Since it has no democratic internal structure, no ideological consistency, there was only one thing which could provide an internal coherency, its leadership. Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the PKK, has become almost a holy figure for Kurds. Actually, when the PKK was fighting the Turkish state, deep-state elements started to imitate them. The very Turkish state against which they were fighting started to penetrate into their mentality, their way of thinking. Ruthlessness, Machiavellianism, the worship of cult-like figures, authoritarianism and a religious-like aura have become indispensable parts of the PKK.
While Turkish prosecutors were bringing cases against Kurds just because they address Abdullah Öcalan as “distinguished” or “Mr.,” “Mr. Öcalan” has indeed become a superhuman in the eyes of Kurds.
Öcalan, of course, has done everything in his hands to prevent any competition to himself. As far as I know he is the only terrorist leader in the world who could maintain his authority over his organization while serving his prison sentence. In his specific case, his captivity has even increased his charisma.
Turkey, with all its extreme measures, has wiped out all reasonable political actors who have tried to advance Kurds’ rights with peaceful measures. While Turkey continued to step up its pressure on Kurds, it created a vacuum in which only violence can breed and prosper. Violence promoted only the people who speak this language. After each closure, a new Kurdish political party was established, but each time they became more and more dependent on the PKK. And the PKK became more addicted to conflict and its leadership.
At the end of this long and bloody process the Turkish state presented an “Atakurd” to Kurds. “Atakurd” set a trap for this government: He first gave a signal that Kurds are ready for a peace process, then his organization did everything to sabotage this process. They wanted to weaken the Justice and Development Party (AK Party); this is exactly why they did not support the Ergenekon process, even though Ergenekon has a lot of Kurdish blood on its hands. Holy Atakurd has now been using every single tactic and strategy he has learnt from the Turkish deep state to weaken the government and to strengthen his position, and we will see how much he is going to be helped by the Turkish deep state in his endeavor.
