The search for public consensus has turned into a shouting match between the government and opposition. The military, seized by an atavistic responsibility to referee, has gone out, paint brush in hand, to touch up the red lines across which no political initiative should trespass. All the while the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), Abdullah Öcalan, sits in his solitary cell like some Lord of the Rings wizard, exercising an uncanny influence over the debate. It has become all too clear that the Kurdish “overture” (my own rendering of the Turkish “açılım”) is no longer just about how to resolve one of the region's most stubborn conflicts. It has become a test of Turkey's ability to factor through its problems and a proving ground for its democratic will. It can take a small crumb of comfort that it is not the only society to be so tested.
Turkey's Kurdish conflict has cost the lives of some 40,000 people since 1984, resulted in more than 17,000 unsolved murders, cost billions of dollars in military expenditure and countless billions more in wasted opportunity. Yet even this seems cheap beside the failure of the United States to provide health insurance for one in five of its citizens, which is conservatively calculated at more than 20,000 people every year. The debate over the White House's proposal to staunch this flow of blood has also not proved to be an exercise in consensus building. The only good thing to say about it is that at least American reactionaries do not point to Turkey or any other country and say this dastardly attempt to look after the health of the nation is all some foreign plot. Although they do say it is an attempt by Obama to impose a failed foreign system of national insurance.
Both in Turkey and America, the vehemence with which the debate is being conducted calls into question the whole project of winning public support for reform. Turkey has long suffered from its reputation of top-down social reforms, and is this is the sort of bureaucratic condescension which this current government is pledged to fight. Of course it is a pledge they do not always remember. Yavuz Baydar, in his column on Friday, rightly reminded us of the shellacking which the government took when it tried to amend the Constitution after its re-election in 2007. They were accused of contemplating dramatic changes without making consultation.
“Let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend,” was Mao Zedong's famous recipe for promoting social consensus back in 1957. Once he heard what the dissenters had to say he decided to hang the lot.
This is not a procedure I would commend to Turkey's beleaguered prime minister. However, I would argue that he has committed himself to a reform process and that it is impossible to withdraw now. His credibility is at stake, and he must either succeed with his overture or step aside. The opposition parties, commentators remind us, enjoy virtually no support in the Kurdish Southeast of the country. In the name of national unity, they are content to pursue policies which divide Turkey into camps.
The bizarre twist is that all these weeks later we still do not know the exact nature of the measures which the government will propose. More than the details, we need to know what sort of society it is that the government believes we should be striving for. The prime minister has been busy speechifying; some of his rhetoric has been moving. The time has come to move towards deeds.
The stark choice facing the government is whether it can make reforms unilaterally or whether their success depends on getting the PKK to agree to bury their guns. Dealing with the PKK directly would mean bestowing some degree of legitimacy on a hated foe and risk the possibility of provoking great public anger. The prime minister clearly hopes that the first step of his overture will be all the concession he needs -- talking directly with the Democratic Society Party (DTP), the Kurdish nationalist group which is, after all, represented in Parliament. But this might not be the case. In that eventuality, the prime minister needs to draw red lines of his own, announcing that he will listen to anyone who advocates peace. He can assure himself that the people of the Southeast have long wearied of conflict and are more than ready to listen to conciliation.
