Pentagon boffins have surely commissioned studies of how to stage an amphibious landing of land-locked Chad. In Turkey, both common sense and the sheer flow of stories leaked to the press would have us believe that there are whole departments running round like hamsters in a cage, working out strategies to spin public opinion and keep the government under control. And surely somewhere, on an old floppy disk in a basement somewhere, is a plan to bring the Kurdish conflict to an end.With all the current talk of a solution to the Kurdish problem being imminent, the obvious question is why it has taken this long. It has been 10 years since Abdullah Öcalan was tried and convicted. The outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) he led took up arms 25 years ago, and the nationalist rebellion in the Southeast of the country is older still. It has taken this long for Turkey to redefine a problem of ethnic-based insurrection in political terms and to come up with a solution -- that is, assuming a settlement is as close around the corner as commentators now suggest.
Turkey is not unique in dragging its heels or failing to prepare for the right contingency. It is easier to get into conflicts than to get out again. If the world welcomed the presidency of Barack Obama, it is because he gave the impression that he could, unlike his predecessor, think more than one move ahead. It seemed child's play overthrowing Saddam Hussein but, like the Turkish problem of trying to retrieve the stone carelessly thrown in the well, it has proved much harder to rebottle the chaos this unleashed. The Turkish strategy to problem solving is in some ways more subtle and in others more blunt. Turkish troops went into Cyprus 35 years ago; they're still there, with any number of consequences for Turkey's relations with its allies. A political solution has been around the corner for many years, but there is a large body of opinion who declared the Cyprus issue resolved when Turkish troops drew a line through the island back in 1974. Turkish lobbyists in Washington relive the grim events in eastern Turkey in 1915 every year. To many in Turkey, the real problem over 1915 is that the Armenian diaspora is prepared to politicize something best forgotten. “You lost lives, we lost lives, so ‘moveon.com,'” the attitude goes.
If further proof were needed of the Turkish nation's ability to suffer events, it is the way the electorate tolerated three decades of chronic inflation up until 2001.
Part of the problem is that the longer matters go unresolved, the longer groups which have no interest in ever resolving the problem have time to coalesce. Look at the coalition of interests in America, which regard any attempt to provide medical insurance for the worst off in society as somehow undemocratic. In Turkey, there was an “inflation lobby” which thrived on the high interest rates and a system of government spoils. What the press now refers to as Ergenekon and which in former times was referred to as “the deep state” is nothing if not a product of the war of attrition in the Southeast. There were those on both sides who sought to perpetuate conflict and keep loyalties divided. The huge sums needed to pursue the military operations, the license violence gave to rogue and extrajudicial forces, the cost in lives that pulled on the emotions of the nation were all colors in the Ergenekon palette used to depict a nation in permanent peril.
Some of the current discussion in the current debate of resolving the Kurdish question is the identity of the interlocutor who would sanction and oversee an end to violent means. Who does one solve the issue with? Could it possibly be Abdullah Öcalan or the Democratic Society Party (DTP), who pays him covert allegiance? These are weighty issues. But the first step is finding the resolve within Turkish society itself.
