Kurds should not eat poisonous honey

Turks and Kurds are Sunni Muslims and have peacefully co-existed in Anatolia for the last 1,000 years. Interethnic marriages have always been common, and there are maybe millions of ethnically mixed Turk-Kurds in the country. More than half of the Kurds in Turkey do not live in their traditional lands of eastern Turkey but in western parts of Turkey, such as İstanbul. We have fought wars shoulder-to-shoulder, and at the Dardanelles, Turks and Kurds fell together when defending the country against imperialist powers. The problem started when Turks' common sense and wisdom were hijacked by some nationalist thinkers, and Turks decided to jettison their traditional inclusive and “ethnicity-blind” understanding of a nation. With the Young Turk Revolution, our political leaders and most of the intelligentsia succumbed to the promised sweetness of the poisonous honey and decided to give it a try, following our former subjects the Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs and so on. There were of course some factors that forced Turks to prefer nationalism, but after 100 years of experience, one can confidently state that nationalism has not been a healthy source of food for thought. On the contrary, it seems that it has been a food for the thoughtless. It was wrong to forcefully try to assimilate Kurds and transform them into Turks.

Forty-thousand lives have been lost as a result of the fight between Turkish security forces and Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) terrorists. Some $300 billion of the nation's precious and sorely lacking funds were lost because of the fight. And, these are only calculable, direct losses. As of today, even the iron-fisted army concurs with the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MİT) that more democracy, human rights, the first-class treatment of Kurds and socioeconomic development are the only potential cures to the problem. Last year, several retired four-star generals, including the seventh president, Kenan Evren, confessed that they were wrong to ban the Kurdish language and to try to iron out cultural differences. But, Devlet Bahçeli, the leader of the MHP, argued a few days ago that the democratization package will divide the country and the nation. This is not surprising given the fact that Turkish nationalists have never had any feeling of empathy and never thought about what they would do if their mother tongue was banned. What is more, their nationalism has always been a servant of the “sacred” Turkish state. That is why the oligarchy that has nothing to with Turkish nationalism could easily manipulate and abuse them by just whispering the magic words: in the name of the Turkish nation.

Turkish nationalists are not the only ones who have eaten the poisonous honey. Turkish Islamists have also treated themselves to the honey. If you look at the Islamist Felicity Party (SP) leaders' reactions to the Kurdish problem, the government's proposed democratization package, the Ergenekon terror organization case and civilian-military relations, you will see that they are first and foremost “sacred-state” lover nationalists and then inclusive Islamists. Kurds' Democratic Society Party (DTP) is no different. They seem to think that Kurdish nationalism is good nutrition. Instead of working toward a more democratic Turkey where everyone will be first-class citizens, they always prefer to be provocative. They deny it, but they seem to be vying for a Kurdish state. Instead of welcoming the democratization package, they ask the state to speak with Abdullah Öcalan, an offer that only provokes Turkish nationalist sentiments. Kurdish intellectual Altan Tan told us last month at the Abant Platform that there is a nice Kurdish saying: If someone does not want to throw a stone, he would stick to the heaviest stone available. It is understandable given that if he is poisoned, he would not have any energy to even lift his finger.