Work in progress

Is opposition party CHP launching its own initiative to help solve the Kurdish issue? Some people say they are working behind the scenes, talking to NGO’s and representatives of the Kurds. It’s also pointed out that more than ten years ago the CHP wrote a report about democratisation as a possible solution to the Kurdish issue. The CHP is nowadays very nationalistic, but they were once a real social democratic party, and, at the beginning of the nineties, CHP leader Deniz Baykal even met with one of the leading Kurdish politicians, now DTP chairman Ahmed Türk, after Türk was released from prison, to discuss the problems of the Kurds. It could be that the social democrats in the CHP are now getting stronger again. Still, all the alleged talks the CHP might be having now to come up with a plan are secret. So we don’t even know if it’s true they are actually taking the initiative.

The talks governing AKP are holding with all segments of society, are not secret. But it’s a work in progress, so there is no clarity about what the Kurdish initiative from the AKP might involve. It’s funny, by the way, that the CHP is one of the main critics of the vagueness of the AKP plans, and at the same time they don’t even reveal what they themselves are doing.

Equally vague is the road map to peace that PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan was to reveal on the 15^th of August, the date on which 25 years ago PKK violence started. No plan eventuated, and it seems this is largely due to weather conditions . Weather conditions? Yes, it’s rather windy here, as it is on the Marmara Sea where Öcalan is locked up on the prison island of Imrali. Due to the wind, his lawyers cannot visit him, so the plan can’t be finished and can’t be made public.

So, there is a whole lot of initiative taken, but in the end, nobody knows the content of any plan. Yes, some parts of the Öcalan plan leaked out to the press. Yes, it’s obvious that the AKP will propose something about education in Kurdish and probably something about a change in the constitution. But up till now it’s basically just all guessing and speculating. Only one party is actually really clear in its perspective, and that’s ultra nationalist MHP. They just keep repeating that the Kurdish initiative is aimed at destroying Turkey. I don’t think that’s the sort of clarity people are waiting for, possibly not even all MHP voters.