One village guard leader recently said 3,000 people have died so far from his tribe alone due to the Kurdish problem. This should be brought to an end, he said.The village guard system was established in 1985 to fight against terrorism. The system envisaged arming some villagers to serve as guards, but made the problem worse. Village guards, serving as paramilitary forces, not only joined security operations but also in some cases acted as little warlords and used their guns in personal conflicts.
Highly educated guesses suggest that around 1,400 village guards have lost their lives since the establishment of the village guard system. In short, not even half of the village guards, 73-year-old clan leader Mehmet Adıyaman claimed last week.
Of course, even if only one person had lost his life, that matters. Forget about dying; even if one person's nose bled because of a political problem, this must be taken into account. But engaging in politics over dead bodies -- whatever side the body belonged to -- is just making a difficult situation worse.
Pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) leader Ahmet Türk spoke this week in Diyarbakır at a rally termed “Yes to honorable peace.” Speaking in all sincerity, he said, “Let peace come today, and I am ready to die tomorrow.”
He also said those who paid a price in the fight should be asked to provide a solution. By this he, of course, means the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which is listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the US and the European Union.
Since the government introduced the initiative -- whether as the “Kurdish initiative” or as the “democratization initiative” -- the DTP has refused to play its role and tried to toss the ball to the PKK, though this move simply means sending the ball out of play.
However, had Türk not done this, he would have received harsh criticism from radical pro-Kurdish circles. And of course these circles are powerful because they are radical. They would have told him: “Who are you? You were only tortured and imprisoned for our cause, but PKK members were killed. They have more of a right to speak than you.”
This “the price paid” talk is not a recent development. The costliness of “the price paid” is always an important element in pro-Kurdish politics. If there is ever a dispute, the one who paid the heavier price is, by default, right.
This illness is not unique to Kurdish politics; Turkish nationalists suffer from a similar attitude. They believe the readiness to die for the country forms the scale of patriotism. For them, contributing to the country in matters such as ensuring scientific development, working for a prosperous society, serving to establish a strong democracy and defending human rights are not patriotic at all.
In general, their politics do not care much for matters related to life and efforts to make life better. These endeavors certainly don't count as much as death. But this attitude contains an element of hypocrisy. Those who exaggerate the numbers of the dead care not for who died and under what circumstances or when and how. This is because asking these questions requires finding answers for them. And so they act in accordance with a very old -- and thank God, disappearing -- tradition of this beautiful land: hiring people to mourn.
Here, we not only suffer from a lack of answers to these questions but also from not paying attention to problems of the system from a scientific perspective.
For example, we have no idea how many soldiers who served in southeastern Anatolia are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Close to 2.5 million young men served here, but how many of them are psychologically fine? No research has been conducted into this, or if it has, it hasn't been shared with the public. And if it has, then it is important to use it to form state policies; otherwise, why bother taking the time to research the matter?
I think one of the biggest obstacles to the Kurdish initiative is the hypocritical attitude that loves death, but the only way to solve the problem is to love life and appreciate it.
