ORHAN KEMAL CENGİZ

I have been acting as a legal counselor for Christians in Turkey for quite a long time. One of the biggest difficulties I have had all this time is my inability to explain to my clients a simple fact: There are no ready solutions to their problems in the hands of the Turkish state, which made all its investments on protecting and exploiting problems rather than solving them.

For example, my clients wanted their church to acquire “legal personality” but did not understand that there was no such thing as a “legal personality” for religious institutions in Turkey.

The founders of the Turkish Republic destroyed any legal capacity that minority religious institutions had during the Ottoman times and they did not replace these old institutions with anything new. There was a huge legal gap in relation to legal personality issues of religious institutions and it was deliberately created. This was true not only for Christians but also for Alevis and Sunni Muslims alike. While Turkey was leaving the multi-ethnic, multi-religious structures of the Ottoman Empire behind, many problems emerged. These problems were left untreated and sometimes were deliberately protected to manipulate society and to protect the privileged status of the Kemalist militarist elites.

Military guardianship and the privileges of Turkish elites could have only been protected if there had always been extraordinary circumstances in Turkey which justified the unbroken grip of the military over this system. How could, for example, the Turkish military so easily interfere with everything in the political system if we did not have endless armed conflict between left- and right-wing militants before the 1980 coup and an endless armed conflict between the Turkish military and Kurdish rebels after the 1980 coup and onwards?

This government of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party), which is now trying to solve the Kurdish question, represents a breakaway from this problem addict state tradition. However, putting aside a state tradition is one thing; creating a different one is completely another. In this sense, I have no doubt that the government and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wish to solve the Kurdish problem.

And now things which we could not have imagined before are happening in Turkey. During Newruz this year, on March 21, the long message of Mr. Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), was read out in front of hundreds of thousands of Kurds and this message was delivered to the audience through officials who are working under the direct orders of the prime minister. Something is definitely happening in Turkey, but could this process lead to lasting peace?

I have some suspicions as to whether the government has a detailed roadmap for the solution of the Kurdish question. It seems to me that they have some rough ideas but not a roadmap. When I read Murat Karayılan's statement on the T24 news portal on March 24, my suspicions just heightened.

Karayılan said that they “do not know if the government has a project for the solution.” However, he also said that they will follow the call of Öcalan and they will leave the country.

Öcalan's orders may be enough for them to leave the country, but when we look at the experience of other countries, we can see that without serious advance preparation, a peace process can easily fail.

When I read Karayılan's statement together with that of Hakan Fidan, the undersecretary of the National Intelligence Organization (MİT), to the Sabah daily on Jan. 6, I got the impression that there may be a serious lack of planning for the process ahead. Fidan in his statement said that Turkey will follow a Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) program for the PKK to lay down its weapons and for its members to reintegrate into society in Turkey once again. The DDR is an extremely complex, technical program that requires vigorous prior preparation. As is stated by the Netherlands Institute of International Relations (see their report “DDR: Mapping Issues, Dilemmas and Guiding Principles”), for DDR to succeed, “both the leaders involved in the peace negotiations and their field commanders need to be prepared to assume responsibility for implementing the peace agreement.” Karayılan is not one of the field commanders; he is the number two of the PKK and yet he does not know anything about a possible plan for a DDR.

A DDR is only one, yet a crucial, element leading to complex peace process. It may be very easy for people who left behind the problem addict attitude of the former elites of Turkey to be mistaken that this simple change in mentality will lead to automatic solutions to problems. Leaving aside a problem-feeding mentality is surely one thing, but to be a problem solver is another. I really hope that the government is aware of the distinction between them!

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