There is now reason to be more than ever hopeful for peace, mainly because militarists on both sides have finally realized that there can be no military solution to Turkey's Kurdish problem. Ankara has long since understood that its identity policies are no longer tenable in the age of human rights. The Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq is more aware than ever that its interests require friendly relations with Turkey. And all concerned with the region, including the US and the European Union, are well aware that stability in the region is an absolute necessity on all counts, including economy and energy. Signs of preparation for peace in Ankara started coming early last fall. And Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan finally declared on July 22 that the government had initiated work on reforms to put an end to the Kurdish problem. Interior Minister Beşir Atalay said at a press conference held on July 29 that the government was preparing “a solution that would set an example for the whole world” and called on political parties, civil society and the media to lend support to measures soon to be announced by Erdoğan himself.
Whatever the “Turkish model” the government has in mind, it will surely be based on the heated debates and intellectual inquiries of the last two decades, which have indicated the basic principles for reforms that can be acceptable to the majority of Turks and Kurds of Turkey. The problem at hand has four main dimensions, and a solution has to address all of them.
The primary dimension is political. It necessitates full recognition of the Kurdish identity, which had been completely denied and suppressed until as late as the 1990s. All the remaining restrictions and prohibitions on the free exercise of the Kurdish language and culture have to be lifted without exception. In this context, the original Kurdish names of thousands of settlements in Kurdish-majority areas must be restored. Turkish will surely remain the common language of the land, but schools and universities should offer elective courses in Kurdish on demand. Universities should establish institutes and centers for the study of the Kurdish language, literature and culture.
The adoption of an entirely new constitution to replace the one drawn up by the military in the early 1980s is an absolute necessity if Turkey is to ever consolidate democracy. Before that is achieved, however, it is necessary that the existing constitutional provisions concerning citizenship are amended so as to refrain from any references to ethnic identity. The ethnic meaning official policies have attached to “Turkishness” since the founding of the republic has, unfortunately, rendered the concept unusable in simply signifying citizenship. The bill on public administration reform that has been shelved since 2003 has to be put into force so as to strengthen local governments not only in Kurdish-majority regions but throughout the country.
The second dimension has to do with security, that is, with the armed insurgency of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) that has been going on for the last 25 years. The PKK set out in the late 1970s to unite all Kurds under a Marxist-Leninist state and has waged an insurgency combining guerilla warfare with terrorism. It has, during recent years, basically declared that it has abandoned separatism and that it is ready to lay down arms if Kurdish identity is recognized to the full and its militants are granted amnesty, allowing them to lead normal lives. A further cost for Ankara for failing so far to find a political and civil solution to the Kurdish question may be the impossibility of achieving peace without at least indirectly involving imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, who is once more offering conditional assistance in the process.
The third dimension has to do with the relative socioeconomic underdevelopment of Kurdish-majority provinces in the southeastern and eastern parts of the country. It surely is impossible to attract investments and thus achieve development in the region without first securing peace and stability in the region.
The fourth dimension, finally, is the problem's international dimension, that is, the fact that only half of the world's estimated 25 million Kurds live in Turkey while the rest are spread mainly in neighboring Iraq, Iran and Syria. Turkey needs to and can gain the trust and respect of all Kurds by recognizing its own Kurds' rights and freedoms and thus consolidate its democracy. In this context, close relations and the deepening of economic and cultural interdependence with the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq will surely be an important component of the solution to Turkey's Kurdish problem.
I have been putting forward the above ideas in writing and speech for nearly 20 years and will not tire of doing so until Turkey achieves domestic peace, which is an absolute precondition for its future political and economic wellbeing.
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