Maintaining the positive process in N. Iraq
The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is no longer just a Kurdish problem. There is another point to think about here: The ball is in the courts of both the AK Party and the Democratic Society Party (DTP).
These two parties picked up between one another nearly all of the Kurdish votes in the July 22, 2007 general elections. So now if the Constitutional Court rules that these parties should be forced to close down, will that also not mean that all of the Kurdish votes were for naught and that, in a sense, Kurdish voters are now being penalized? And won’t this situation, if in fact this is what happens, strengthen the radical forces in Turkey’s Southeast as well as those who support violence and weapons? These are not new questions, of course, but they are still relevant. In short, if we continue to see the only problems as being the PKK, violence and poverty and if we don’t start attaching any importance to the dimension of what the Kurdish identity really is, the end of this road will never come.
14 May 2008, Wednesday
HASAN CEMAL, M?LL?YET
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