The PKK wants to agitate Turkish masses
by
EMRE USLU & ÖNDER AYTAÇ*

In the city centers, the PKK particularly concentrates on standing targets, i.e., police stations, army barracks and the service buses that transport security personnel from their homes to work. It seems that in the short run the PKK could carry out successful attacks on these targets; however, the PKK’s attacks could easily be prevented by taking proactive measures. For instance, if the service buses were to use different routes between the two points it would be very difficult for the PKK to target them. The security measures around the standing targets should also be tightened to protect against such attacks. However, the implementation of the additional security measures will take time. Thus, the PKK could carry out a few more attacks in city centers in the coming days. Yet, in the long run it would be very difficult for the PKK to organize such attacks as it wishes.

If the PKK in the long run cannot win this war in city centers, then why does it take such risky steps that could jeopardize its legitimacy in the eyes of its supporters? Some analysts suggest that the PKK is losing its operational ability. Therefore, it concentrates its attacks on the city centers as a last resort. Indeed, it is true that the PKK has been losing its operational ability since the United States started sharing intelligence with the Turkish military. Nevertheless, this approach still falls short of explaining why the PKK moved its attacks to city centers.

An alternative explanation would lie in the PKK’s strategy to bring the Kurdish and Turkish masses into a confrontation. Given that the PKK has chosen the ethnically diverse cities to carry out such attacks in order to ignite such confrontation, the real aim of the attacks is to agitate the Turkish masses against the Kurds.

The basic premise behind this strategy to agitate the Turkish masses is closely associated with why the PKK could not achieve its goal over the last three decades. The PKK’s initial plan to establish an independent state was developed based on the idea that the Kurdish masses eventually will join the PKK when its strategy begins to work. However, despite the fact that the PKK successfully established a mental distinction between the Turks and the Kurds, the organization could not use its strategy to create a successful secessionist movement supported by the vast majority of Kurds.

One of the reasons the PKK was not successful with its strategy is the state’s effort to foment the idea that the Kurds and Turks are Muslim brothers and that the enemies of both peoples want them separated. Although the Kurds did not buy into the brotherhood argument, the Turks did. The majority of the Turks sincerely believe that the Kurds are their brothers and that the PKK is a proxy organization to those who want to harm Turkey. Such acknowledgement allows Turks to separate the PKK from the ordinary Kurds. The development of the Turkish-Kurdish brotherhood idea helped Turks to accept even the large volume of Kurdish migrants in the 1990s without any major problems or confrontations. Thus, the PKK could not mobilize the Kurdish masses to enter into confrontation with the Turkish population.

However, in recent years, the neonationalists deconstructed the idea of Turkish-Kurdish brotherhood. Even worse, the neonationalist circles replaced it with the new idea of the Kurds being a threat to Turkey, with the Kurdish population eventually taking over Turkish cities.

The deconstruction efforts of the neonationalist circles opened a new possibility for the PKK to shift its concentration from convincing the Kurdish majority to join the PKK to agitating the Turks to exclude the Kurds from their neighborhoods. In the event of such, Kurds in major cities would have no other option but to join the PKK.

Given that Turks, when faced with such circumstances, usually act based on their emotions rather than by making reasoned calculations, the PKK’s premeditated attacks in urban centers would seriously endanger Turkey’s stability.