It is extremely important to understand why the DTP leadership has chosen this way. In recent months, the DTP politicians increasingly reduced the Kurdish issue to Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). They claim that there cannot be a lasting solution without first doing something about Öcalan. What is something? They have not said it loudly yet, but everyone knows what it is. They want Öcalan to eventually be pardoned and given permission to engage in politics. Can this strategy ever work in Turkey?This is nothing but an eclipse of reason. The DTP leadership is blinded by Öcalan’s personality myth. It claims that millions of Kurds want to see Öcalan as their legitimate political leader. Thus the struggle to solve the Kurdish issue is reduced to Öcalan’s personality cult. If he is happy in his cell, everything is fine. If he has complains about his room or food, everything is terrible. What kind of political reasoning is this? How can a political movement with this kind of blindness promise the Kurds in Turkey a reasonable political solution?
Everyone knows that the DTP is not an independent actor. Its members inside and outside Parliament only execute orders from PKK commanders. Therefore, comparisons with the IRA or ETA do not make much sense. The DTP is not the political wing of the PKK. If it were, it would have had some degree of autonomy and could possibly direct the PKK towards a solution. Right know, the DTP is neither a political party nor an outlawed terrorist organization. It is oscillating between legal politics and illegal terrorism. While exercising all of the rights and privileges of legal politics in the Turkish Parliament, it also makes use of the power of PKK fighters and their weapons. Which is the true DTP? Is the DTP really trying to moderate the PKK fighters? Or is the PKK in total control?
This cannot be reasonable politics for the Kurds in Turkey. If DTP leaders have any sense of political responsibility and a role to play, it should not be to justify the PKK’s terrorist acts, such as the recent killing of seven soldiers in Tokat, but to force the PKK into a political solution.
After the closure, DTP leaders have to question their policies and overcome the Öcalan personality cult that has been dominating and blinding their policies. The Constitutional Court has dealt a major blow to the democratization process by closing the DTP. But it is up to the Turkish people and reasonable politicians to overcome this mistake and remember that two wrongs do not make a right.
