The CHP's memory of the Kurdish issue and its proposed solutions

The process that began with Bahçeli shaking hands with the DEM group at the opening session of the Turkish Grand National Assembly's legislative year has brought with it discussions of "is a new resolution process beginning?" While these discussions were ongoing, DEM Co-Chair Tuncer Bakırhan made a call to the CHP at his party's weekly group meeting: "How will you solve the Kurdish issue? Go ahead and explain."

The fact that this call was directed at the CHP—as if the last 10 years had never happened—rather than at the government, which has been swallowing up democracy in Turkey by instrumentalizing the Kurdish issue for nearly a decade, reminded me of the harsh attitudes of the government and the predecessors of the DEM toward the CHP during the resolution process. This memory of mine is what prompted me to write this article.

IS THE CHP THE CAUSE OF THE KURDISH ISSUE?

Following Bakırhan's statement, we saw how a group of writers close to the government pivoted extremely nimbly in line with the new discourse. You would think we are in 2015... Before reaching the next stage of this, which is the "CHP is the cause of the Kurdish issue" phase, I decided to write about the facts before succumbing to perceptions, as one of my areas of expertise is the CHP's discourse on the Kurdish issue.

So, how do I know the matter will come to this? The Turkish right has a habit of blaming the CHP for every misfortune. Indeed, this mentality holds today's CHP responsible for the state's extremely harsh suppression of the rebellions that broke out in the East and Southeast, primarily between 1923 and 1938. In fact, the DP and its founding leader Celal Bayar, whom they historically see as their predecessors, were also individuals who focused on this issue, traveled to the region, prepared reports on the unrest there, and therefore did not put sentences on paper that were much different from those of İnönü and Atatürk, whom they see as the culprits. Again, due to the weight of their conservative side, the report of Marshal Fevzi Çakmak, with whom they established a continuity, was the only report among those written about the region to explicitly use the word "assimilation." Therefore, it should be noted that the cyclical history they love to create, which focuses on names and ignores the continuity and flow of history—starting with the criticism of İnönü—by using an à la carte perspective, will not work in this regard. This is because the authors of more than 20 reports written between 1923 and 1938 were also located on the right and left of the center within the multi-party life.

The important point here is to reveal the folly of interpreting the modernist period with post-modern values, a historical understanding that is quite problematic in terms of being both anachronistic and eclectic. First of all, one should not confuse the unrest in the East and Southeast during the early Republican period with those that emerged with today's mass, identity-based, and post-materialist values. Because this causes us to overlook the fact that the unrest of that period emerged against the risk of the aghas and sheikhs, who lived off the backs of the people and appropriated surplus value, losing their regional autonomy and arbitrary practices over the people with centralization. For example, it is useful to think about the fact that the Sheikh Said rebellion emerged immediately after the de facto abolition of the Tithe (Aşar) tax.

Another element that should not be forgotten at this point is that the foundation of the unrest in the region dates back not to the early Republican period, but to Ottoman modernization. Because modernization and centralization, as stated above, created an ontological threat to the positions of the aghas and sheikhs who held social privileges. At this point, it should also be noted that the rebellions resulting from this unrest that emerged during the Ottoman period were not suppressed any more innocently than those that broke out during the Republican period. Therefore, the thesis that the Turkish right, for manipulative purposes, credits the 1923-1938 period to the CHP and claims that the root of the post-modern period's problem lies in what happened during this period does not reflect the truth very well.

More importantly, this thesis is also a copy of the historical thesis of the PKK, which claims that the foundations of the Kurdish issue go back to the Sheikh Mahmud rebellion, then to Sheikh Said, to Ağrı... in order to create a historical legitimacy for itself after its emergence. What happened between 1923 and 1938 is not an extension of the CHP's "Kurdish allergy," but a result of the urge of Turkish modernization, which had a history of nearly 100 years at that time, to eliminate feudal remnants. Therefore, these reflexes, while on the one hand being an extension of the modernists' desire to destroy feudal remnants to reach bourgeois democracy, which they see as a more progressive stage, are on the other hand too deep-rooted to be credited to the CHP. In the expression favored by the right, what happened during the single-party years is actually "state reason" rather than the history of the CHP. The identity of the CHP, just like the DP and the AP, was brewed within the multi-party life.

WHO DID WHAT IN THE MULTI-PARTY PERIOD?

With the multi-party life and the DP government, one of the most important phenomena regarding the Kurdish issue has been the migration from village to city. During this period, migration took place from Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia to large cities, as it did from everywhere else, and this caused Kurds to both understand their linguistic and cultural assets compared to Turks and to see the chasm between the East and the West socio-economically. Therefore, it is possible to say that the foundations of why Kurdish youth, who became actors starting from the mid-1960s and correspond more to the second generation of those who migrated, gravitated more toward leftist politics lie here. After May 27, while Kurdish youth were organizing through magazine activities, the TİP, which represented the socialist left of the post-May 27 era, became a center of attraction for Kurdish intellectual circles both in terms of eliminating the feudal structure in their own regions and being able to put forward a developmentalist perspective.

Indeed, the TİP also included a section corresponding to a page under the title of "Development of the East" in its program accordingly. Furthermore, according to its 1964 program, the party emphasized that it would apply positive discrimination to Alevis and citizens who speak Arabic and Kurdish due to their systematic exclusion. The Eastern Meetings led by the TİP, which began in August 1967 and represented the first of the important turning points for Kurdish intellectuals to realize that the time had come for them to emerge as a separate subject, caused the CHP to observe the unrest in this region better. Indeed, Ecevit, who went on a tour of the East while the rallies were ongoing, expressed that the "left-of-center" regime change program prioritized the development of the East-Southeast as follows:

"Just as it is contrary to the laws of nature to deprive people of their right to live by forbidding them God's air, the injustice in the distribution of God's land is equally contrary to nature. A system contrary to nature cannot survive."

Indeed, Beşikçi also affirmed these views during this period, stating that such a transformation that would shatter feudal relations was a condition for the people of the region to attain their freedom. The CHP, which advocated for a regime change and, as a special place within this, a separate transformation in Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia in the process leading up to the 1980 coup, entered a new search after the systematic exclusion of the entire left, including itself, following September 12.

The SHP wing of the democratic left-social democratic movement, which had been divided into two because Ecevit did not come together with the CHP tradition again, made a distinction between the existing terror problem and the representatives of the Kurdish political movement, whom it believed carried the potential to be the political representatives of the Kurds, along with the PKK. In this direction, the SHP brought names from the Kurdish political movement to parliament in 1987 and 1991, and also published its 1990 report, known in the public as the 1989 report, titled "The SHP's View on Eastern and Southeastern Problems and Proposed Solutions."

While this report was important in its own right because it was published at a time when even saying "Kurdish" was considered separatism by state organs, it is also important that the party showed persistent interest in this issue despite the negative reactions it received from politics and the public. In the report, where it is stated that the solution to the Kurdish issue is a prerequisite for the democratization of Turkey, it was expressed that this issue cannot be solved by denying an ethnic identity and through assimilationist policies. According to the report, where the problems of Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia are categorized as human rights violations, terror, violence, economic backwardness, poverty, unemployment, a sense of insecurity, and an identity crisis, the solution to all these problems is the priority of the SHP. It emphasized that the ANAP administrations of September 12 and thereafter saw the entire population of the region as potential criminals, and in this direction, while establishing an endless state of emergency (OHAL) regime on the one hand, they made the region's problematic feudal structure even more problematic by dividing it into feudal lords who were "on the side of the state" and those who were "not on the side of the state" with a freak system like the Village Guard System.

While preventing these and similar anti-democratic practices in the region, this SHP report, which included contents such as the use of Kurdish, broadcasting in Kurdish, and the ability to provide private education in Kurdish, pointed to an extremely progressive point for this period, and was even investigated by the State Security Court (DGM), which was one of the symbols of the anti-democratic institutionalism of the period. The fact that the DYP interpreted this report as Erdal İnönü's betrayal of his father, and the ANAP as vote-hunting, can also be expressed as other elements showing the progressiveness of this report. Furthermore, the statement in the report that while fighting terror decisively, anti-democratic state practices that allow terror to become permanent by constantly creating a base for itself would be prevented is also overly bold for its own era. In other words, the SHP drew a line between the method of solving terror and the method of solving the Kurdish issue, just as Kılıçdaroğlu did after 2011.

The SHP's interest in the Kurdish issue was not limited to this; from the critical report prepared by the delegation sent to the region after the 1992 Nevruz, where a major massacre took place, which stated that the state was the culprit of what happened, to the "Now is the Time for Peace" declaration in 1994, and to the emphases in the declaration at the merger congress with the CHP that the Kurdish issue would be prioritized, this issue was always among the priorities of the 1990s SHP-CHP. Moreover, these emphases were continued despite Ecevit, who had a great influence on the social democratic base independent of the votes he received and was like a natural leader, accusing the SHP-CHP of "separatism."

Following the trauma brought by the AK Party government of the 2000s and its discourses that drifted into conspiracy theories along with nationalist delusions, claiming that the Kurdish movement and the political Islamist movement had reached an agreement with the support of the West with a dual vision of dividing Turkey and leading it to Sharia, the traditional progressive discourse on the Kurdish issue was returned to during the Kılıçdaroğlu era.

In the 2011 elections, the first general election under his own leadership, which took place 13 months after Kılıçdaroğlu became CHP Chairman, some of the headings of the "41 Promises" booklet published by the CHP were related to the Kurdish issue. While the 6th and 7th articles of this booklet stated that the CHP would carry Turkey to a pluralistic democracy, it was stated that the threshold would be at most 5%. Therefore, in line with this article, the legitimate Kurdish movement, which was still participating in elections with independent candidates during this period, would be able to participate in elections with its corporate identity after this transformation. Furthermore, the CHP stated that a Truth Commission would be established and that this commission would uncover unsolved murders in the region and gang formations within the state. Again, the 14th and 17th headings of the report stated that the economic and industrial backwardness of the region would be overcome with a regional development plan.

Again, in the "Democracy, Equal Citizenship, and Free Society" report published in May 2011, the CHP stated that the Kurdish issue could not be solved with either a denialist attitude or an ethnic-centered understanding. According to the CHP, this issue needs a third way, a democratic way, for a solution. The sine qua non of this way is a fairer economic distribution, inter-regional justice, a libertarian cultural approach that does not consider any culture normative, and a free political discussion environment. By 2015, the CHP, in its election manifesto titled "22 Questions 22 Answers," while finding the resolution process, of which the AK Party was the architect, important in terms of preventing martyrs and ending armed conflict, emphasized that it was not sustainable. The CHP stated that because this process was not institutionalized in a legitimate body, in parliament, the AK Party's goal was not to solve the Kurdish issue, but to exploit hopes for peace in order to remain in power.

Indeed, the fact that the process was ended instantly before the day turned to night as soon as the HDP entered the election as a party, passed the threshold, and posed an ontological threat to the AK Party government proved the CHP right in this deduction. The reason the CHP made this deduction was the structure of the process, which both prevented the participation of other actors and was squeezed between Imralı and Beştepe without being institutionalized.

According to the CHP, a real resolution process must rise on four pillars. The first of these is equal citizenship based on an advanced democracy. While the second is a Social Consensus Commission in which all political parties represented in parliament will participate, the third is a Common Sense Committee that includes groups, political parties, NGOs, unions, and employer organizations not represented in parliament. It was stated that another duty of the committee in the third proposal, which operates under the parliament, would be to follow the PKK's disarmament process. The CHP differentiated this model from the government's Council of Wise People, and while saying that that model consisted of people who explained the AK Party's model, it was stated that the CHP's model focused on establishing a committee that explains social demands to the parliament. While the CHP's final proposal was the establishment of a Truth-Finding Commission, the purpose of this commission was described as both examining the arguments of resolution processes in the world and confronting the historical-social dynamics that cause the alienation of Kurds. Therefore, Kılıçdaroğlu's showing the parliament as the place for a solution is not a mere institutional fetish, but is based on a search for a comprehensive ground for dialogue. Moreover, this is also a requirement of democracy. In addition to transparency, it corresponds to the fact that a society, which is at the heart of the idea of democracy, participates directly or indirectly in the making of the laws that will govern it/the social contract to which it will be bound. It should not be forgotten that the participation of society in the making of the social contract to which it will be bound takes place through parliaments and deputies in representative democracies.

The CHP's current approach does not differ from this historical and political line. In this context, the Kurdish movement will either defend the recognition of Imralı, which is a single illegitimate actor, or it will prefer a legitimate ground where the entire society will participate in the process, acting on the fact that a real resolution process can only be possible with a transparent process that convinces not only the Kurds but also the Turks. The preference regarding whether this issue, which also represents a process that has turned into a blood feud, is the priority of the parties or Imralı will serve as a test of the DEM's "Turkey-fication" and the AK Party's "search for a ground for dialogue."

The validity of the CHP's historical emphasis on the importance of issues such as development and democratization in the solution of this issue was understood in the last 5-6 years, during which the boundaries of democracy were narrowed more than ever. From equal citizenship, of which merit is a part, to the fair distribution of welfare and democratization, these are the prerequisites for the solution of this issue. The place to determine the rest is neither Imralı nor behind closed doors. The interlocutors of the issue should be Turks and Kurds, therefore us and our legitimate interlocutors in the political arena. Even if we put all other concerns aside, as we saw in the first example, when this process is reduced to individuals instead of institutions, it becomes exclusionary rather than inclusive, and focused on personal ambitions rather than solution-oriented. Indeed, during the resolution process, although the CHP objected to the method of the issue, Kılıçdaroğlu still said in 2012, "We are giving the government a blank check." Even though Erdoğan responded to this by saying, "You are not the man to give me a blank check," the fact that some of our "intellectuals" applauded this process in favor of Erdoğan with a smiling attitude showed that processes reduced to individuals cause such a reliance on individuals that it leads to the loss of even rationality. Furthermore, these processes, which are also carried out behind closed doors, can cause them to deviate from their purpose of emergence by causing dirty relationships to be entered into, as seen in the example of both sides constantly threatening each other with disclosing the Oslo minutes.

I hope that this time, action will be taken with the realization that caricaturing the demands of a group in society and reducing the process to closed negotiations conducted between two people makes the process fragile. Finally, although what the CHP advocates on this issue is quite clear and consistent, and the government's use of these arguments against the CHP had a significant share in its loss of the 2023 elections, I must state that we have not made a good start on this issue, looking at the DEM's search to put the sincerity of the CHP, not the government, to the test. What the DEM needs to decide is whether it will prioritize Öcalan's demands by taking advantage of the government's predicament, or whether it will prefer a new social dialogue process that will strengthen social peace while overcoming Turkey's democratic predicament?