It is a fact that most Turks think the Turkish military defeated the PKK in the late 1990s, and it is true that PKK activity significantly dropped in 1997. The PKK, however, always had between 5,000 and 6,000 militants in the mountains during the ‘90s. Moreover, the TSK might have defeated the PKK if it weren’t for the fact that the generals and the military strategists had not taken into consideration that the Turkish military, which is supposed to be a national army and conscripts its soldiers from every segment of Turkish society, is alienated in the Kurdish region. Most of the Kurds in the region now consider the Turkish military as a colonial army and have no sympathy toward it.
If the Kurds are mentally separated from the rest of society, largely because of the military’s strategy of “dominating the battleground,” shouldn’t we ask what exactly the Turkish military achieved and at what expense? If Kurds no longer consider Turkey as their own country, the Turkish state their own state and the TSK their own military, can we still talk about a “successful military” engagement against the PKK? What is success? Killing more militants than losing solders? Separating the Kurds from the rest of the country?
When one asks such a question, military generals fire back with “it is not our job to win the hearts and minds of Kurds,” and “it should be the politicians’ job, they are the ones who failed to develop effective strategies to keep the Kurds and Turks away from danger.” However, throughout the 1990s, the TSK was the dominant state institution and told the politicians what to do. When politicians, such as a former president, Turgut Özal, came up with alternative policies, the TSK criticized them very harshly and even conducted preemptive attacks to block any political solutions.
The TSK has insisted on the idea that Kurdish nationalists use the PKK as leverage to keep the people of the Southeast under pressure so as to establish political dominance in the region. Therefore, the effective remedy for such dominance would be to remove the PKK from the area and provide free and fair competitive ground for political parties. It sounds good in theory, but in reality the TSK has not achieved any degree of success in eradicating the PKK. The PKK has always been in the mountains, exerting its influence and using its weapons to threaten other alternative political development in the Southeast.
If this is the case, the TSK neither achieved success in implementing its intended policies nor defeated the PKK entirely. This doesn’t mean that the TSK was defeated either. The PKK was unable to defeat the TSK, but the PKK achieved its aim in alienating the TSK and successfully depicting the Turkish military as a colonial military in the region. Therefore, it is safe to say that politically the PKK is winning over the TSK because it at least achieved its goal of dismantling its base and pushing Kurds away from the state and Turkish society.
In my next article, I will analyze whether the “dominating the battleground” strategy was a successful strategy.
