The new initiative of the government, setting the framework of the solution within democratization and respect of human rights as opposed to the former inclinations that saw both the problem and the solution as a security issue, is worth all the praise. This shift, I hope, is a shift in the paradigm and will apply not only to Kurds but to all Turkish citizens. But, democratization is not all that the Kurdish issue needs.Democratization is about the future. It does not undo the wrongs of the past. It will certainly prevent further Kurdish youth from going to the mountains and joining the ranks of the separatist terrorist organization. It will sow seeds of hope among the Kurds about their future, their cultural rights and their economic welfare. But it won't let mothers whose beloved ones are still missing deal with their grief.
What is needed is a meta-event.
A meta-event is an event that puts its mark on the phenomenon it relates to. Just as the Aug. 17 earthquake changed the meaning of earthquake in Turkish minds, just as World War I still has an enduring effect on the mindset of European nations about what war is, just as the French Revolution changed the general perception in the West of “revolutions” before and after the French Revolution, we need a meta-event that will create a new grand narrative about the Kurds of Turkey. We need a meta-event that will make the mothers of killed terrorists believe that their sons were not killed in vain. But on the other hand, we need that event to assure the mothers of Turkey's martyrs that their sons will never be forgotten. We need that event to rewrite the whole history of Kurds, Turks and other peoples we share this land with, once again. We need that event to rewrite our common future.
Unless we manage to find that meta-event, discourse on reconciliation, facing the dark pages of our history, blaming the coalition of the deep state and the deep Kurds, positive discrimination by means of economic and social investments, granting cultural rights and recognizing a Kurdish identity won't work. None will make peace with the past: Turks will continue to hate Abdullah Öcalan while praying that he won't die in prison so he will not be turned into a martyr in the eyes of the Kurds; and the Kurds will continue to be over-defensive and skeptical about any use of the term “Turkish,” including in places such as Turkish coffee, Turkish bath and Turkish flag. Coffee we can call Greek; the bath we'll call Roman. But what shall we do with the flag?
We need a meta-event that will reset the connotations of value-laden words like Turk, Turkish, state, army, soldier, administration, Ankara, territory, homeland, nation, mother tongue, martyr and so on, and fill them in with neutral, mutually acceptable, non-exclusive connotations. Our languages have unconsciously turned into conflict-ridden languages. This cannot be undone by democratic reforms alone.
A social contract is the solution.
After the demise of the Ottoman state, the republic was not able to create that social contract. The newly emerging state was from the very beginning formulated as exclusive of any existing identity. This was not an assimilation of minorities within the dominant identity. This was an imposed melting pot of identities that rejected not only the Kurdish identity, but anything other than the idealized “modern, secular, Western-bound, obedient, state-loving, Sunni Turk.” This was a construct which had no external existence then.
We were all made.
We need to unmake ourselves. We need a new constitution prepared in such a way that it will deconstruct our imagined identities and start from scratch to build an amalgam of celebrated differences.
That is not an easy task and the government should not be left un-helped and un-checked by the civil society in this process.
