The street demonstrations occurring in some major cities and the terror attacks in the mountains, as well as other forms of ongoing violence, are closely connected to both these issues.Ergenekon is a case that may do a lot for Turkey in the way of rapid progress, provided there are no external interventions. Unfortunately, the local elections seem to be elevating tensions. The issue is not whether the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) or the Democratic Society Party (DTP) will win major strongholds; the elections have turned into a power struggle over the Kurdish question and the Kurdish voters. Nobody is able to give a precise and authoritative figure on the actual size of the Kurdish population in Turkey; however, estimates indicated that the number is somewhere between 12 and 15 million. This shows that Kurds have a great impact on politics. A brief analysis of the political tendencies of Kurdish voters will show that they mostly prefer conservative religious parties. The Milli Görüş (National View) parties, known for their strong attachment to religious precepts and values, have received the greatest number of votes from the predominantly Kurdish areas since 1969. The fact that the AK Party, which evolved from this tradition and declared that it had adopted a "conservative-democratic" identity, received a substantial amount of votes in the region in two consecutive elections confirms this. But certainly the whole issue is not all about this.
The political parties engaging in politics over Kurdish identity or ethnic Kurdish nationalism had the largest amount of votes in the region in the elections of Nov. 3, 2002. Conversely, in the elections on July 22, 2007, the DTP, which relies on a policy of Kurdish identity, lost 20 percent of its support. Meanwhile, the AK Party increased its votes. For instance, its votes increased from 15 percent to 41 in Diyarbakır, from 34 percent to 71 percent in Bingöl and from 6.8 percent to 33 percent in Hakkari. Mardin is a predominantly Arab city, but as a result of the shift in the preferences of Kurdish voters, the AK Party increased its votes from 34 percent to 44 percent there.
The 2007 elections showed that the AK Party had become a party of Turkey. The other two major parties -- the Republican People's Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) -- failed to stage political activities beyond the Ankara-Sivas line, let alone getting support from voters in the Southeast. Naturally, this made the AK Party and the DTP the primary rivals in the region. In the upcoming elections, these two parties will face a bitter race for the votes of the Kurdish electorate.
After sketching out the current situation, we can take a look at the recent escalation in terror and violence. From the escalating tensions, it appears that the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) does not want to allow the AK Party to see similar success this time. This is the message the PKK is delivering indirectly: Like other parties, the AK Party cannot make an influential appearance beyond Ankara. It cannot engage in politics there. It cannot receive the votes of the Kurds. To achieve these goals, it relies on its familiar method of violence.
One of the reasons for the Kurdish voters' massive support for the AK Party in the 2007 elections was the speech Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan delivered in Diyarbakır on Aug. 12, 2005. In this speech Erdoğan admitted that the state had made mistakes vis-à-vis the Kurds, adding that acknowledging mistakes was a part of wisdom. Through this speech, he made concrete promises to resolve the Kurdish issue. If 75 percent of the Kurds voted for the AK Party in the 2007 elections, the actual reason was the promise made in this speech. However, some time has passed since then, but no progress has been made. The AK Party reduced the issue to a matter of economics. Making the same mistakes as its predecessors did, it relied on a discourse by which it argued that there was no identity problem. In so doing, it aligned itself with the military and, unfortunately, this took us to the beginning, where the language of terror and violence was -- and is -- dominant.
