Two Sides of the Same Coin/2

(Due to common Internet problems in Turkey, I can only publish this article today. Apologies to my dear readers)

Closer to a way out or provocation?

For almost two weeks every columnist in every daily in Turkey wrote about the "Kurdish problem" following a declaration by President Gül. In that speech Gül claimed that there are opportunities for a resolution. According to the official state opinion, Kurdish fighters should give up arms and end the fight against soldiers for them to even start talks. A cease-fire is not sufficient for talks to start.

An unbiased observer might find this claim reasonable. A state cannot initiate talks officially with a party that is in war with it. It is conceived to be a minimum for negotiations to start.

But here lies another Turkish state policy. As it was implemented against all minorities for centuries since the Ottoman times. Once they get you down from your mountains, once they make you sit behind a table and start to talk, these talks never end and you cannot gain anything. Furthermore, they would not talk, or continuously deny all the deeds they've done against you. You would start to forget why you have gone up on the mountains in the first place.

Example #1: They claim they did nothing wrong against the Armenians, Pontic Greeks and Assyrians back in 1910's right. To initiate talks with Armenia on Genocide they ask for an independent panel of historians to decide if it was a Genocide. Here's the catch: this panel would be served with the Ottoman archives by the Turkish State and only with these.

Example #2: They claim the Turkish Army or the gendarmerie did nothing wrong against the Kurdish villages during last three decades. And the above mentioned negotiations would be on the terms that one side would be a terrorist organization which accepted that it is, and the other party would be a legitimate state that is defending the rights of its citizens against terrorists.

The people of Kurdistan are living in minefields at one end, and a hostile army on the other side for decades. White Renault 12's are coming in with dark suits inside them to pick people up on the streets, people who never comes back. Mass graves are found everywhere with bodies washed with acid.

Yes the Kurds are fighting with guerilla tactics which can easily be considered as terrorism. But what about their enemies? What are they?

Kingdom of Fear

When we are asked "what are you afraid of?", we internalize the question. The answer is almost always about personal fears. However what we are afraid of on a daily basis is totally different than virtual fears we talk about. Modernization resulted in a terror society. Political, technological and spiritual gains, augmenting variety and possibility of choices increased casual shrewdness and rudeness paradoxically. Terror observed radically and exceptionally in democratic societies, affect societies which does not incorporate a social order, and lacking a social contract more. From politics to media; entertainment to driving, terror rules every aspect of our common schedules. That's the real fear.

Agitating when asked, fears like "I'm afraid to tell my opinion", "I'm afraid to drive", "I'm afraid to go to the police office" are the real fears.

We are afraid of speaking our minds. But we are not afraid of embezzling millions of liras.

We are afraid of crossing the street, but not afraid of attacking someone with a knife.

We are afraid of educating ourselves but not of ignorance.

We are afraid of law, but not of unlawfulness.

We have created an order where rules can only be broken. And we hate it, though we do nothing to change, or to change it.

The kingdom of fear, chaos, disorder is our making. It's our choice. We have to change our choice: we have to chose to let live to live humanly. Without dismissing our past, our experience, we have to learn about ourselves by looking at our society through the scope of historical reality. Not by retaliatory action, far away from orientalist reflexes, we have to democratize ourselves.

That's to be our lesson...