It may be either “engaging in subversive activities to undermine the unity of the state with its nation and homeland” or “encouraging the use of violence in politics or being an accessory to a terrorist organization.” The first is a constitutional cliché that really reveals the official ideology of the state’s tutelage over the nation. All laws and institutions are made to protect the state from threats emanating from within and without. “Within” means from its own people who may resist or question the state’s prerogative. That is why state tutelage over society is a permanent fixture of the regime. The Constitutional Court, for that matter, is part of the institutional arsenal created after the 1960 coup to buttress and to safeguard the state. So there is nothing surprising about why the DTP was banned; this party did not comply with the rules of the game or better, it proposed to change them.
What will be the outcome of the ban? Politically it will not leave a big gap in politics because the DTP was hardly able to be an independent actor and positively contribute to the constipated politics of the country. The party’s speakers repeatedly said that they were not the party to discuss any kind of solution or engage in a negotiation with the Kurdish side. The main actor in Kurdish politics was the leader of the armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) who has been in jail for the past 11 years (on İmralı Island). Although no political party should point to a third actor when the solution of the country’s problem of bloodshed is concerned, the DTP leadership has constantly done this, failing to act as a go-between for the organized and dissident Kurds and the Turkish establishment and majority.
Unfortunately, this is the reality of Turkey. Today Kurdish politics has been weakened by two flaws. 1) The hard-liners, comprising those who have taken up arms (PKK) and their unarmed supporters organized as a legitimate party (DTP), constitute only one-third of the Kurdish population of Turkey. Yet, they dominate Kurdish politics both by coercion and by agreeing to pay the price of its rebellion. 2) The remaining two-thirds are moderate Kurds who refuse to endorse violent political means, and although they demand that their cultural identity be acknowledged, they do not reduce politics to mere identity rights. They harbor a wider perspective for integration on an equal footing and demand legal protection for their rights and differences. The rest of what they expect and demand is for all citizens, not only for Kurds. But this majority Kurdish population has been cowed by the PKK and oppressed by the Turkish establishment. That is why they cannot put their weight into politics and neutralize the more violent segment of their brethren. If the government really wants to mobilize Kurds behind its democratization initiative and to break the monopoly of the PKK over the Kurdish population, it has to open the door to and encourage these moderate groups/individuals onto the political stage.
The reason why the DTP was unsuccessful in making a difference and subduing PKK violence was because it was the creation of the PKK support base. In fact, there are two influential actors in Kurdish politics: İmralı (where PKK chieftain Abdullah Öcalan is serving a life sentence) and the Kandil Mountains in northern Iraq, where the PKK enjoys a safe haven for forays into Turkey. Kandil has a mandate over armed actions, and İmralı has the mandate over street actions, the main actor of which is the Kurdish youth, who have seen nothing other than death, destruction and despair in their short lives. Both of these parties dominate the scene and do not want peace and a democratic “opening” that will make them redundant. This means violence will go on until either the government convinces the Kurdish people with its reforms that violence is not necessary to solicit rights or the PKK wrests an amnesty to transform itself into a legitimate political organization after decommissioning and Öcalan is released from confinement and kept under observation (house or farm arrest) somewhere in the Southeast, where he can have free contact with his subjects, sorry, supporters!
