24 September 2009 / BUGÜN ADEM YAVUZ ARSLAN,
Seen from a foreign perspective, the debates over the democratic initiative in Turkey are completely incomprehensible. Here is what we have: When the topic starts off with terror, everyone is unanimous in the opinion that “the mothers of our country need to stop weeping!”
This is quite a natural response. At the same time, though, every institution in the nation, starting with the political parties themselves, seems to be engaged in a contest to see who can best derail this whole process. As it is, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) is involved in a very dangerous game that depends largely on using lots of inflammatory speeches aimed at the administration, speeches filled with words like “traitor.” The MHP is an opposition party, so of course it is expected to criticize. But still, I am quite sure that the MHP leaders have not really calculated the devastating effect that words like these are having on the average television viewer. If you were to take the pulse of the average patrons of the coffeehouses that run along the shoreline, you would see that more and more, opposition to the government is turning into “opposition to the Kurds.” And thus the Kurds and the Turks, whom even 25 years of terror has not been able to make into enemies, will finally be separated by these dangerous words from the MHP.
