Woman carries portrait of jailed Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan in Nowruz gathering in Diyarbakir, Turkey, March 21, 2016. Murat Bay / Press Association. All rights reserved.In 2002 when elected for the first time, Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) made six important pledges. These were: to develop ‘a new pluralistic constitution which respected the ethnic and religious diversity of the country’; to establish a ‘strong democracy’; to strengthen the ‘rule of law’; to respect ‘freedom of speech’; ‘to have zero problems with neighbours’ and ‘to find a peaceful resolution with the Kurds’.
None of these pledges have been fulfilled. On the contrary: Turkey is in the fifteenth year of an Erdogan-led government, and all of these six areas are in a worse state than before. In the 2016 World Press Freedom Index, Turkey is ranking 151. This is lower than Russia, Pakistan, South Sudan, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan and almost the same level as the Democratic Republic of Congo. In this article, I want to focus primarily on the worsening of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict. Unless Turkish-Kurdish relations improve, I contend that it is not possible to resolve the other five pledges. The Erdogan-led regime has not only put Turkey into a rogue situation, but the state is now heading towards a civil war.
A thriving PKK and Kurdish diplomacy
Turkey, since its establishment as a Republic, has never achieved sustainable peace. Kurds still cannot freely learn and use their language in educational, legal, political and even social arenas. The PKK movement and the conflict between Turks and Kurds is one of the major reasons for this. The Turkish state has not tried to make peace in any real way, merely reiterated attempts at military ‘solutions’. These have not brought about any progress in the last hundred years, and are not moving anything forward now. Different Turkish governments have mouthed platitudes and postponed any real actions towards peace. There has never been any substantial move towards building trust and increasing tolerance between and within different ethnic groups. Successive Turkish governments did not show any understanding of the real sociological problems in Turkey.
