By Lars Haugom

March 11, 2016

The Turkish military has no known intention to intervene in the political decision-making process. However, the military has retained a capacity to do so - both by means of its continued role in security policy making and its relative institutional autonomy. The extent of any military involvement in politics will largely depend on how the Kurdish issue is handled by the government. But it is still highly unlikely that any such involvement will take the form of a direct intervention.

Murat Belge in Birikim writes that the reigning mentality in Turkey is that tension is the best ally of rulers. Tayyip Erdoğan saw that declaring war on the Kurds would give him back what he had lost, and he made those who called for stern measures against the Kurds happy. Tayyip Erdoğan had also decided to make peace with the neo-nationalists with whom he had been jarring until recently. After the parting of ways with the Gülenists, there is a potential to make peace with the Kemalists, or at least with some of them. When the Kurds are struck, some of the nationalists who hate the AKP can’t help but to be happy about it and they start thinking that the AKP may have some “positive” sides. Can these circles forget, let alone pardon, all those “Sledgehammers” and “Ergenekons?” I don’t think so. But this is the world of politics. It may be necessary to store away some problems for a while; and then, when you have become sufficiently strong, you think that you will extract them again. For the time being, this is the prevailing mood among those circles. So, can we thus conclude that Tayyip Erdoğan has gotten his “rose garden without thorns?” Well, history has never seen any such “rose garden.” What a look at the facts tells us is that these policies of tension and quarrel that Tayyip Erdoğan has made so much use of have confined him to a terrain that is becoming increasingly narrow.

Mümtazer Türköne in Zaman writes that the Kurdish issue was the most important reason for the survival of the AKP in government, but that the way the state views the party has changed after the PKK was allowed to stockpile arms and ammunition in the cities during the solution process.  Ultimately, the AKP was tolerated by the military, the bureaucracy and the judiciary – after they had struggled for a long while against it – because the continued rule of a party that could get votes all across Turkey was also a gurantee for keeping the state in one piece. But during the solution process, the PKK was able to become entrenched in the cities, stockpiling arms and ammunition there. Carelessness and deliberate mistakes let this happen, and it amounts to treason. Now, those who were responsible for these mistakes are going to pay for them. The current security bureaucracy and the provincial governors who issued the orders of non-intervention against the PKK in the face of reports that it was stockpiling arms are going to be seated next to each other as accused at the coming mass trial. That is the only way for the state to put its house back in order.

Arzu Yılmaz in Birikim writes that the value of the PKK for the Kurdish people is above all that it is a defense force. The Kurds, who felt hopeless in the face of the cruelty they endured for years, managed to acquire relative defensive capability with the PKK.  However, especially what has happened during the last six months has depreciated the value of the PKK as a defense force. There is no ground for presenting the fact that resistance in Sur or in Cizre has continued until today as a success story. What is clearly obvious is that the Kurds are without defense and stand alone in the face of the violence to which they are subjected. What is especially difficult for the Kurds is that they once again find themselves in the position of “victims.” Yet only a year ago, “self-confidence” prevailed among everyone on the streets of Kurdistan. The claim “the Kurds are no longer the old Kurds” above all expressed the conviction that the days of “victimhood” lay behind the Kurds. But that was not true… everyone to whom you speak ask the PKK, “Why did you enter a war that you could not win?” But even if the Kurds criticize the PKK, they are not engaged in any attempt to exclude the PKK. This must above all be realized by the government that is trying to invent new interlocutors in Kurdistan. For the Kurds, the PKK is still, with all its faults, something that belongs to “us.”

Ali Bayramoğlu in Yeni Şafak writes that the geopolitical winds are behind PKK-PYD and against Turkey. Turkey does not have any card up its sleeve that it can deploy to stop the Kurdish region in Syria that it sees as an existential threat. As long as this balance persists across the border, it is not reasonable to expect that Kandil (the headquarters of PKK in northern Iraq) is going to abandon its attempts to establish areas of sovereignty, its strategy of creating cantons, by means of urban warfare and the politics of ditches. The statements of the authorities promising that “soon the cleaning will be finished, and public order will be established,” appear naïve considering past events and the present balances of power. This is so even though a significant part of the population in the region does not approve of the actions of the PKK. This does not mean that they have edged closer to the approach of the state and its position. Isn’t it time that Turkey revises its reading of the region, its view of the Kurdish movements, the Kurdish question and its roadmap for the future?