Gov't working on solution to Kurdish problem

Speaking yesterday on the eve of his departure for a day-long trip to Syria, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told reporters that the government had begun working on the Kurdish question under the coordination of the Ministry of the Interior -- though opposition parties remain skeptical and have expressed concern over the plans, the details of which have not been released.

In his remarks, Erdoğan warned strongly against views and opinions that might derail the process, calling for unity among party members, in apparent reference to comments made by some deputies from his ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) who said that the government should talk to the jailed leader of the terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), Abdullah Öcalan.

“Whatever you call it -- the Kurdish question, the eastern question, the southeastern question or, more recently, the Kurdish initiative -- we are working on it,” Erdoğan said. “We began one week ago to work on the issue with members of the National Security Council [MGK]. As you know, the Interior Ministry is responsible for domestic security, and so we tasked them with [this project]. They are holding talks with other ministries, and they will continue to do so.

They will engage in preparations; they will also have talks with other [state] institutions, such as the General Staff, the National Intelligence Organization [MİT] and so forth. They will also meet with deputies from the [Southeast] region. They will bring us a fully developed, truly multidimensional study; we will conduct our final evaluations of it and announce it to the public,” the prime minister said.

The prime minister, however, did not provide any details, saying only: “Of course as politicians, we are not in a position to acknowledge what we are doing and with whom we are doing it. We are talking about the result.”

Party unity is important

Erdoğan also underscored in his remarks the importance he assigned to unified discourse on the matter within his AK Party.

Recently, prominent AK Party member İhsan Arslan, deputy chairman for political and legal affairs, had suggested that if members of the outlawed PKK were to return from the mountains they should be granted amnesty and jobs and that the families of those killed should be compensated.

Speaking to Today's Zaman on Tuesday, Arslan had said that if he had the power, he would have addressed the issue together with the PKK's Öcalan, who is preparing to announce his proposals for a solution in mid-August. This expectation sparked the most recent discussion on the Kurdish question.

When asked in the same interview whether he was aware of a program the government had in hand or was preparing, Arslan had replied: “I am just a deputy from the AK Party. I reflect my own views, nobody else's. What I say is a result of having empathy. I say that if I had the power, that's what I would do.”

When Erdoğan was reminded that some AK Party deputies were making “bold” statements, he said that Turkey was a democratic country and that everybody could say whatever the wanted -- but added that he would not like for any statement by a deputy from his party to harm the unified discourse. Erdoğan did not name anyone specifically.

“We have to keep our discourse unified,” Erdoğan said, and quoted a few lines from a poem by Yunus Emre, a 13th century Sufi mystic who said, “Some words can lead to the beheading of the person who spoke them.” Erdoğan said: “We don't want to go there.”

Erdoğan also claimed that there had never been any ethnic discrimination in Turkey: “Turks, Kurds, Laz, Circassians, Abkhazians -- all of them were always shoulder to shoulder, sometimes even in wars, and became martyrs in each other's arms. This is what kind of a nation we are, but there are some people who want to change this. Our government is not such a government; just the opposite, it is always aiming to bring about unity.”

Erdoğan also said that his party had been working on the issue since it came to power, recalling the launch of a state television channel with 24-hour Kurdish-language broadcasting and the $12-13 billion invested in Turkey's poverty-stricken Southeast. Erdoğan also claimed that his party had removed the obstacles before the use of the Kurdish language and introduced computers to children in the region.

Pro-Kurdish figures skeptical over Erdoğan remarks

Erdoğan's remarks of yesterday were not well received across the board, with the opposition critical of his statements and pro-Kurdish circles voicing concerns.

Selahattin Demirtaş, chairman of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party's (DTP) parliamentary group, said that if the government wanted a durable and permanent solution to the Kurdish problem, it had to work with Kurds and Öcalan.

“Any initiative which is taking place without consultation with the Kurds will not, I am afraid, be adopted by the public. If the government is sincere about finding a permanent solution to the problem, it should not hold back from taking Öcalan as a counterpart,” he said.

On the other hand, prominent Kurdish intellectual Ümit Fırat said that some pro-Kurdish circles took the “counterpart” issue almost as a fetish: “If the government is to restore the former Kurdish names of settlements and places, it does not need a counterpart. But on the other hand, the prime minister mentioned the coordination of the Interior Ministry, which is essentially responsible for security. So the question is whether this new initiative is based on security as it always has been perceived or whether it really will elaborate on the problem, not only within the concept of security, but from a wider scope,” Fırat told Today's Zaman.

He added that Erdoğan's remarks on “boldly speaking AK Party members” increased his suspicion that the government is preparing a plan that will attempt to tackle the problem from the vantage point of security alone.

Emin Aktar, chairman of the Diyarbakır Bar Association, called Erdoğan's remarks at the very least a sign of a governmental effort to solve the problem, though flawed in some ways. “Nobody should expect that the government can treat Öcalan as a counterpart for the time being, but if the government wants arms to be laid down, it must find a way to listen,” he said.

Aktar recalled that Erdoğan underlined that regional deputies would be consulted in the process. “But I am not sure which deputies he was talking about. From the speech as a whole I gather that he was only talking about deputies from his party, but the DTP is also there, and he should listen to the DTP as a party. Meanwhile, while again his words about the boldly speaking deputies from his own party are very thought provoking, it shows the level of democracy within the party and is also a reason to be skeptical about the content of the plan the government is working on,” he said.