30 July 2012 /YETVART DANZİKYAN
If you allow, I would like to start my article with a quote from the former Chief of General Staff Gen. Yaşar Büyükanıt from 2007: “The PKK’s [Kurdistan Workers’ Party] presence in northern Iraq has taken root there now, and an operation against northern Iraq should be carried out.”
This is a statement from a time that the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) termed a “period of tutelage.” And I would like to quote Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan today, when the AK Party claims the tutelage period is over: “We will not let the terrorist group [the PKK] set up camps [in northern Syria] and pose a threat to us.” As can be seen, when it is about the same issue and the same region, the discourse never changes. And what has changed? It is that the regional Kurdish administration in northern Iraq and Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) President Massoud Barzani, who were regarded as enemies before, are now good friends with the Turkish state, although there has been no change in the PKK issue.