While opposition parties are trying to hinder the proposal, the government has nothing but to go forward with its plan. Simply opening the floor of Parliament to such a debate can potentially open a new political opportunity space in Kurdish politics, and we can expect new political actors to emerge as existing actors lose their influence if they fail to readjust their policies and organizational structure accordingly.Nature of new opportunity space
Examining current developments, one can easily detect several key points that suggest to us how the new opportunity space will look like. The state institutions’ visibility in the new political space will be reduced much more than in the existing political space in the Kurdish region. In practice, fewer checkpoints, fewer riot police, fewer military operations, in turn, will generate an environment that promotes civil society. It seems the Kurdish initiative that the government is proposing is opening new doors for private investors to provide Kurds services they want -- i.e., Kurdish institutions, broadcasting, education, etc. It means the state is at least withdrawing from some areas that have been providing services to the people in the region. The withdrawal of the state from the Kurdish domain necessitates the emergence of new organizations to fill the state institutions’ role. This role is to provide services to the people of the region. Democratically elected municipalities may potentially be the right institutions to provide such services; however, the municipalities’ financial and political structures do not allow them to provide necessary services to the people in the region. Such a transformation in the political opportunity space will produce new political discourses and new political actors.
The Kurdish nationalist political discourse has long developed as a reactionary political discourse to “fight” against restricted political opportunities in the Kurdish region. Fights in political discourse transformed into a political movement; the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) advocates an armed struggle to expand the limited political space of Kurdish intellectuals. Yet the armed struggle further shrank the opportunity space and ended up killing healthy Kurdish discourse to produce the intellectual base for Kurdish nationalism. In the end, most of the Kurdish identity has been injected into larger segments of Kurdish communities; however, the Kurdish identity debate was limited to a vicious cycle between anti-Turkish rhetoric on the one hand and imitations of early Turkish nationalist practices on the other.
The most difficult task before Kurdish nationalists is to find a new direction when the political opportunity space is expanded after the government’s Kurdish initiative is implemented. It would force Kurdish intellectuals to change their reactionary rhetoric and produce more proactive political discourse to make sense of the new political opportunity space. Yet there is no culture among Kurdish intellectuals to develop or rewrite Kurdish political discourse according to new rules. In other words, if there are no Turkey or Turks to react to, what are Kurdish intellectuals to do? How are they to generate new political rhetoric? More importantly, the new political opportunity space requires establishing new Kurdish institutions to facilitate new Kurdish rhetoric and maintain Kurdish nationalist debates. It means altering the habits of Kurdish political actors.
Nature of new political actors
As a result of the contracted political opportunity space, Kurdish political actors and organizations have always been reactionary in nature. From singer Şivan Perwer to jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan and from Rizgari to the PKK, Kurdish individuals and organizations always resisted the existing opportunity space. Yet the expansion of the political opportunity space as an outcome of the Kurdish initiative forces Kurdish actors and organizations to reconsider their tactics and strategies to mobilize Kurds around their causes.
The new opportunity space requires more of a service-based movement to reach out to the people in the region. Except for the Kurdish Hizbullah, most Kurdish organizations are “identity-based” organizations that were founded and maintained their unity by generating political identity debates in the Kurdish region. In other words, it was meaningful for many Kurds to attend Nevruz ceremonies in the early 1990s because the Nevruz ceremonies were the symbol of their identity. Yet in recent years, without famous singers and additional cultural activities, Kurds do not want to attend Nevruz activities because identity arguments have taken over their role. On the contrary, the Kurdish Hizbullah, a service-based Kurdish movement, manages to gather hundreds of thousands of Kurds to “celebrate” the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday. This is indicative of the new direction in which Kurdish political organizations’ mobilization strategies are evolving.
