Though the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) won only 5.5 percent of the vote on a national level, it now controls eight provincial municipalities in the East and in the Kurdish-dominated Southeast, doubling the number of municipalities it won in 2004. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) saw the DTP win back Siirt, from which Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was elected deputy in 2003, and Van -- two provincial municipalities it took from the DTP in 2004.
The AK Party won Sunday's municipal elections, but for the first time since it came to power in 2002 it saw its votes shrink. It won about 38.9 percent of the vote in provincial assembly elections across Turkey, representing a two-point decline from the previous local elections in 2004 and an eight-point retreat as compared to the 2007 general elections.
The DTP's major gains in the Southeast in the elections surprised not only the governing AK Party but also many Turks, who are, in any case, not familiar with their own Kurdish problem, associating the problem -- wrongly, most of the time -- with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
If we take into consideration the fact that only the AK Party was visible in the Kurdish-dominated Southeast, together with the DTP, while the other two parties represented in Parliament showed no ambition at all to even provide a fierce race in the region, this proves major Turkish indifference to its own Kurdish problem -- even though the issue stands as a major stumbling block in Turkish democratization.
The gains made by the DTP necessitated a closer look at the reasons for this victory that may guide the future of politics on the longstanding Kurdish issue.
Before 2007, the AK Party pursued policies that protected the Kurds from the establishment, which has resorted to military means alone -- i.e., the fight against the PKK -- forcing the Kurds to make a choice in between the state and the PKK. The governing party did not allow the military to stage major PKK operations in the Southeast while also making considerable democratic reforms that embraced the Kurds prior to 2007, the year that Turkey's politically powerful military issued an e-memo against the government, said Ümit Fırat, a prominent Kurdish thinker, during a debate aired by the local NTV news channel on Tuesday.
"I read the AK Party's decline in the Southeast as a message given by the Kurdish public that they want to be included in the system and that they seek for the Kurdish issue to be internalized and a solution to be found accordingly," Abdurrahman Kurt, a deputy from the AK Party, said.
Here are some major points that are linked to the DTP's major gains in the southeastern region and the AK Party's losses:
1) The Kurds gave the message that the Kurdish problem should be recognized and that the DTP should not be excluded from the system as it is a political party represented in Parliament;
2) In its strongholds, such as Van and Siirt, as well as in Tunceli -- made famous when the governing party distributed refrigerators and other household items as pre-election gifts -- the AK Party lost and the DTP took the mayoral seats because the former failed to bring services to the people;
3) Chief of General Staff Gen. İlker Başbuğ sent a severe warning and a threat to the media for publishing confidential information revealing that the military had known in advance about a deadly PKK attack on the Aktütün military outpost in Dağlıca, around four kilometers from the Iraqi border, in early October of last year that killed 17 soldiers. Prime Minister Erdoğan supported Gen. Başbuğ in his threat against the media; however, an investigation should have been launched against alleged security flaws rather than Erdoğan extending his support to Başbuğ. The Kurds viewed this as another example that the ruling party, which had taken serious steps in remedying Kurdish grievances prior to 2007, had largely shifted its policies, siding with the hard-liners;
4) The AK Party made two mistakes: It chose the wrong candidates, and secondly, it entered into polemics with the DTP instead of emphasizing the positive steps that it had taken, such as around-the-clock Kurdish-language broadcasting as well as the Ergenekon investigation, in which coup plotters are being tried while extrajudicial killings of mostly Kurds since the 1990s are being investigated. People preferred to take the side of the DTP, with whom the AK Party entered into a polemic;
5) The aborted military-led attempts in 2007 to prevent Abdullah Gül from becoming president because of his Islam-sensitive background prompted the Kurds to vote for the AK Party in the 2007 general elections. Politics in the Southeast are based on Kurdish identity and religion. People perceived attempts to prevent Gül from taking this top position as an attack against their values, and they voted for the AK Party in 2007. But the AK Party reversed its stance on the Kurds and has adopted hawkish policies since then;
6) Some in Ankara do not even shake hands with elected Kurdish deputies, and when those such as Gül shake hands with them, it becomes a big issue. Kurdish people see the difference in how their elected deputies are treated as an insult. Simply because the DTP is represented in Parliament, top Turkish commanders refuse to take part in ceremonies at Parliament;
7) Prime Minister Erdoğan used a very tough tone on the Kurdish issue during his election campaign.
The abovementioned points are a mixture of what Fırat, AK Party deputy Kurt and Diyarbakır Chamber of Commerce and Industry Chairman Galip Ensarioğlu said during the NTV debate.
We do not have a tradition of learning lessons from our mistakes. This time perhaps we may do so in order to prevent future mistakes that may have irreversible effects on the country as a whole.
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