Over the past several months, the pages of this column included more than a little criticism of Turkish President Erdogan, his apparent tack to the nationalist right and his decision to abandon the peace process with the PKK. Your humble columnist is not the only one to think that Mr. Erdogan reacted to his party’s June 2015 electoral setback with a brutal, Machiavellian ploy. The ploy centered around a wholly unnecessary internal war that would rally more of the electorate around him by the time of the November 2015 election re-run. The Economist, the New York Times, the Guardian, Foreign Policy Magazine, and countless other august international media outlets took much the same view.
It takes two to tango, however, and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) proved to be Mr. Erdogan’s ideal dance partner in many ways. Even before the June 2015 election, we heard occasional rumblings from various PKK sources that the ceasefire with Ankara would end, or was actually over, as a result of various “provocations” from the Turkish state. The building of dams to flood Kurdish regions, new police stations and military outposts erected throughout southeastern Turkey, poor prison conditions for Abdullah Ocalan, aid to Jihadis in Syria – all these factors and more were referred to in various PKK communiqués. For a movement supposedly intent on a negotiated peace, an end to the armed conflict, and participation in legal politics, this kind of mixed messaging seemed terribly irresponsible (however true some of the PKK’s complaints about Ankara’s actions may have been). One simply cannot offer to end the “armed struggle” while in the same breath also threatening to resume it should everything not go your way.
Then in 2015 came a series of bombings targeting Kurdish and Leftist groups and rallies in Turkey. After the July Suruc bombing of young Kurds and Leftists going to help Kobane, the PKK assassinated two local policemen it accused of collaborating with the Islamic State (ISIS) bomber. Although the PKK later retracted its claim of responsibility (saying a local unit had carried out the assassination without central authorization), it provided Mr. Erdogan the pretext he needed to resume the war with the group (or what many see as Turkey’s war with its Kurdish population in general). Ankara’s bombing campaigns on PKK bases in Qandil and elsewhere quickly saw the movement retaliate with attacks inside Turkey. Soon a new urban-based uprising strategy came into full swing, with Turkish military forces reacting by surrounding whole cities in the southeast. Improvised explosives on the roads, assassinations, guerrilla attacks, bombings (with bombs targeting civilians claimed by TAK, a possible splinter group from the PKK), military snipers, tank fire into urban neighborhoods and endless curfews soon became the new order of the day.
Judging from the November election results in which the AKP (Justice and Development Party) regained its majority government, the PKK played right into Mr. Erdogan’s hands. AKP voters turned out in higher numbers as a result of the conflict, Turkish nationalist voters deserted the far-right National Movement Party (MHP) to vote for the party more actively killing Kurds, some voters abandoned the pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy Party (HDP) because they thought it was too pro-PKK, and many Kurds in the conflict zone could not even make it to the polls like they did in July. Continuation of the conflict also helped justify the kind of authoritarian creep that Mr. Erdogan and his AKP loyalists seem to crave: For the sake of security, Turks were asked to support an executive presidency, a further broadening of the definition of terrorism (if that is possible in Turkey), the stripping of parliamentary immunity from HDP deputies, more surveillance, tighter media restrictions, judicial “reforms,” and even the “urgent expropriation” of Kurdish properties throughout the southeast. At the same time, more dams, police stations and military outposts are still being built, while Mr. Ocalan is now in complete blackout.
What if the PKK had instead refused to fight when Ankara resumed its war last summer? It is of course not easy to get bombed day in and day out or to have your people arrested and imprisoned en masse without reacting in a like manner, but these things are still happening anyhow. How much more difficult would things be for Mr. Erdogan and the AKP if the PKK had instead replied peacefully? Imagine if the PKK had insisted, even in the face of attacks, that it wants to pursue politics in Turkey without violence? If it said that it refuses to kill fellow countrymen in Turkey, including those in uniform? That it prefers to focus on protecting people of the whole region from ISIS jihadis? What if resistance in Turkey continued via peaceful protests?
It seems possible that the already considerable international sympathy for the Kurds would have grown exponentially. The disdain and ridicule of Mr. Erdogan’s increasing authoritarianism and his other shenanigans, both inside Turkey and abroad, would have been magnified that much more – particularly as he ignored ISIS and instead attacked a Kurdish population that refused to fight back the same way. If the November elections had then gone like the June ones -- with a majority of seats in opposition hands -- a commission of inquiry might now be looking into allegations of government corruption and other malfeasance.
In short, democracy in Turkey might not have embarked on the Midnight Express to who knows where and for how long…
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He holds the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and is the author of numerous publications on the Kurds and the Middle East.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
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