My intention was not to draw analogies between Turkey’s bleeding issue with its large Kurdish segment and that of Greece’s still annoyed, but placid, Turks, but when I saw yesterday’s road signs, I asked my road companion, a former deputy of the Turkish minority in the Greek Parliament, why there was a lack of Turkish names for the villages and towns besides the Greek ones.He was bitter, of course, and it was clear to him that the majority would be very happy to wipe out the history of his people. “Peacefully, we have to keep asking,” he said. “Otherwise, our mouths would not be served by their spoons. We call ourselves Turks, not Muslims, here. Yet, they are trying to teach us that we are Muslims. We hope that they will learn someday that you are whatever you say you are.”
Denial and harassment have long been the common realities in this part of the world as elsewhere. Deeper into the millennium, on the other hand, dynamics clash. Societies raised in the hope of keeping everything static and unchanged drag behind.
There are now several conclusions from last Friday’s historic session on the Kurdish issue in Turkey. The first is that the dynamic of moving rocks from where they have stayed seems to have superiority over the other. The leader of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the head of the government, the key figure in the whole process, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is unfazed in his resolve. The interesting part of this is the phenomenon of “swimming against the tide.” The AKP has, according to late polls, lost some further percentage points in handling the process, and it displays clearly in surveys that there is dismay felt by the Turkish majority on the way Kurds turned the PKK militants’ return into a victory. The pain and the memory of it will have to be taken very seriously by all involved.
The second conclusion is that the process will be long, slow and demand a lot of passion. Simply because it has been deeply rooted in the collective mind and the violent industry created will be resistant on all levels. Yet it will have to be measured by the quantity of concrete steps taken by the end of this year. The priority, it seems, will be on the native tongue -- Kurdish -- and its freedom and gradual normalization (yes, it will include the Kurdish names of towns and villages!).
There was a touch of realism in Erdoğan’s address on Friday. He stated that “we should not hope that everything will be problem free. The hope is that we leave a Turkey with less problems for our children.”
The third and final conclusion should be on the misery of the oppositional mind in politics. I wrote a long time ago that despite moves toward finding a common ground, the AKP government will in the end of the day be “alone.” Last Friday’s showdown, reaching a peak when the Republican People’s Party (CHP) left the general assembly en masse, should have dispersed leftover hope that there will be any meeting of the minds on the bumpy road ahead.
The rhetoric exercised by Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) was of no surprise. But I wonder whether any serious politician of the Left Bloc in the European Parliament or any member of Socialist International (SI) would, at this stage, take the rhetoric and behavior of the CHP as “business as usual.” With its performance, the CHP burned almost all its bridges with Turkey’s poor and politicized East and Kurdish Southeast. When seeing the pictures of influential party figure Onur Öymen depicted as Hitler (and, surprisingly not as Joseph Goebbels), displayed in windows and on walls in the province of Tunceli, it is no wonder where in politics the CHP has steered itself into. The next stage will be Alevis seeking another address for their votes.
When I am asked about the differences between parties such as the AKP and the Democratic Society Party (DTP) on one side and the MHP and the CHP on the other side, I always begin with the most important element, which is completely absent from the latter two: conscience. If a prime minister for the first time in the history of the republic can talk about the pain of having one’s village burned and sons killed and of people mysteriously vanishing, this illustrates a major change in Turkish politics since it tells of the power of conscience.
“Those in the opposition do not have the strength or the heart to talk about a solution today,” wrote my Kurdish colleague, Bejan Matur, in her latest article -- which I recommend strongly for my readers -- here in Today’s Zaman. “Old men are banging on their desks in Parliament. What they want to kill is Turkey’s future. The future in which there will be no blood shed between Turks and Kurds. From the lectern in Parliament they are defaming the pain of mothers. They are listening with the deaf ears of a person who has never felt the pain of losing a child. Perhaps their souls are not touched. They are adding poison to the clear waters of the future,” she concludes.
Benzer Haberler 
