The common perception among civic groups is that the AK Party’s Kurdish deputies have not been effective during the democratization process, especially when it comes to explaining the process to a skeptical public.
The government launched the democratic initiative to solve the long-standing Kurdish question in Turkey but encountered strong opposition from other parties. It also faced difficulties from the now-defunct Democratic Society Party (DTP). The AK Party and the DTP are the only political parties that were able to win votes from the predominantly Kurdish-populated areas; yet, they are constantly challenged by obstacles in the implementation of the democratization process. Still, many argue, there was much for the Kurdish AK Party deputies to do to promote the agenda in the region.
Şah İsmail Bedirhanoğlu, the chairman of the Southeastern Industrialists and Businessmen’s Association (GÜNSİAD), told Today’s Zaman that even before the democratic initiative had been launched, right after the local elections in July 2007, the Kurdish deputies from the AK Party were not able to establish strong ties with their constituencies, not only amongst their voters but also with the civil society organizations in the region.
“The AK Party’s Kurdish deputies performed poorly, not only in explanations of the democratic initiative but even on the social and economic policies of the government. For me, the democratic initiative is the most important project in Turkey, and the deputies should have thought that to develop it and explain it to the public was their duty. They could have tried to increase support for the project in the region. They could have been very instrumental in strengthening the government’s hand, but we only saw them on TV programs occasionally,” Bedirhanoğlu said.
He added that even when Interior Minister Beşir Atalay, the coordinator of the initiative, was visiting Diyarbakır and meeting with representatives of civil society organizations, the AK Party deputies did not accompany Atalay.
“They should have been in the region more frequently, but they weren’t,” he said. Another civil society representative, Selahhatin Çoban, chairman of the Diyarbakır branch of the Human Rights and Solidarity Association for Oppressed Peoples (Mazlum-Der), underlined that the Kurdish deputies of the AK Party had a lot to do but that they had failed to deliver. “For example, when the Constitutional Court shut down the DTP, they could have voiced their opposition to closure of the political party more strongly. They are not only weak at explaining the policies of the government to the public, they are also weak in reflecting the demands of the people in their constituencies to the government,” he told Today’s Zaman. Çoban said that in his opinion, the most important actors in politics among those who are supposed to strongly support the democratic initiative are the AK Party’s Kurdish deputies. “They could have accelerated the process, they could have contributed to the efforts of taking bigger and braver steps in the initiative.”
Çoban suggested that AK Party’s Kurdish deputies are not emphasizing the Kurdish part of their identities and not emphasizing the existence of Kurds, either. He said the two main political parties of the region, the pro-Kurdish party tradition and the AK Party, are not serious in their relations with civil society. “Both of them are meeting and listening to civil society organizations because it is a tradition in democracies; they don’t really mean to establish relations or cooperate with them. If the reverse were true, all these reports and demands would have been taken seriously by the political parties in the region,” he said.
Çoban recalled that when the deputies of the now-defunct DTP decided to resign from Parliament, civil society organizations urged them to reconsider their decision, but the DTP deputies told them they were resolute. But they backed down after Abdullah Öcalan told them to stay in Parliament.
Öcalan is the leader of the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) who is serving a life sentence in the İmralı Island prison in the Marmara Sea.
Prominent Kurdish intellectual and former politician Tarık Ziya Ekinci underlines that the Kurdish deputies in the AK Party could have explained the democratic initiative not only to their constituencies but also to the West and to the Turkish public. “One of the main obstacles to the democratic initiative is the resistance from the general public. If this initiative is not explained well to the public, it cannot be successful. The
AK Party’s Kurdish deputies could have done that. They could also have tried to convince their own friends in the AK Party,” he said. He recalled that at the beginning of the initiative, İhsan Arslan, the AK Party’s deputy from Diyarbakır, had said that if he were in government, he would have addressed the issue to Öcalan but that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at that time harshly criticized Arslan, although not by name.
Ekinci said that as a group of Kurdish intellectuals, they occasionally invite prominent persons to address them and up until now many people have, but that not a single Kurdish deputy from the AK Party has taken up the invitation. “I guess they are acting within the framework of the party, but they should have been assigned to explain the initiative to the public; there are very important and well-informed names among them,” Ekinci told Today’s Zaman.
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