When former Turkish president Abdullah Gül spoke to reporters after Friday prayers last week, he cautioned against a return to the “dark” climate of the 1990s. Turkish television screens have been carrying visual reminders of those dismal days with the near daily images of the funerals of the people who died during the Turkish army's campaign against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Against this backdrop, Gül's remarks were an implicit criticism of the government's management of the crisis in southern and southeast Turkey. On 20 July a suicide bombing in Suruç killed 32 people and wounded more than a hundred others. All the victims in the attack were Kurds who until recently were partners in a peace process with the ruling Justice and Development Party (JDP) government. But the two sides have now parted ways permanently, it would seem. Concluding his statement abruptly, so as to avoid a barrage of questions from the journalists who had been waiting for him to emerge from the mosque, Gül stressed that it would be pointless and senseless to revert to what had proven pointless and senseless 20 years ago. Terse but impassioned, the former president's remarks struck a chord with most of his fellow citizens. After all, the majority of Turkey's people had looked forward to laying to rest the painful memories of three decades of strife. It was on 30 January 2013 that Recep Tayyep Erdogan, who was then prime minister, revealed news of the peace talks that until then had been conducted secretly with PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, who is serving out a life sentence at the high security prison on Imrali Island in the Sea of Marmara. Opinion polls at the time reflected widespread popular support for the step, which promised to bring to a peaceful end the most intractable problem the young Turkish Republic had faced in its nine-decade history: the Kurdish question. Sadly, after that collective sigh of relief and about two years of hope, the Turkish public is staring at that dark and endless tunnel again, and they have Erdogan to thank for this. It was he who said that, from now on, “anyone who says that there is a Kurdish problem in Turkey is promoting division, strife and partition.” Now, apparently, the position is that the government could not have stooped to such a negotiating partnership, and that the state makes all the decisions. That state, which Erdogan sums up as himself, has now determined that “the peace process with the Kurds is over.” Naturally, people are mystified by the sudden change of heart. The secrecy shrouding the decision only compounds the confusion. But in recent days developments on the ground, across the borders in northern Syria and Iraq, have led many to suspect the true intentions of the JDP government, as Iraq has come in for the lion's share of F-16 strikes. When the Turkish government suddenly jumped off the fence and announced that it would now play an active role in the fight against the Islamic State (IS) group, many said, “It's about time.” But it turns out that the government was not all that interested in IS targets in Syria. Instead, it vented its wrath against PKK camps in Iraqi Kurdistan. True, the PKK had carried out a terrorist attack against two policemen, but did that necessitate a response of this magnitude? According to official government figures, the aerial assaults have killed at least 260 “rebels” in the Qandil Mountains to which PKK forces had withdrawn two years ago precisely in order to give the peace process a chance. That people are asking such questions with increasing frequency ultimately means that the arguments and justifications cited by the caretaker government of Ahmed Davutoglu are greeted with mounting scepticism by large segments of the public. That scepticism has been fed by the masks that have been coming off in Ankara ever since it shifted from absolutely refusing to make Turkish airbases available for the war against IS to making those bases absolutely available. But the irony is that the Syrian Kurds who have been at the forefront of the fight against IS have now become prime targets for US-made F-16s, as though it had not been sufficient to keep them under a blockade over the past few months after they recaptured Tel Abyad from IS. Curiously, when Washington gave its blessing to Ankara's “right to defend itself”, it made no overt reference to the targets that Ankara had set in its crosshairs. These happen to be the Kurdish People's Protection Units (PPU) on which the US-led international coalition has relied heavily and to which it has furnished aerial support in the war against IS, most recently from Incirlik airbase in Adana. Of course the real target of the JDP wrath are the Kurds at home who had the audacity to cross the 10 per cent threshold in the last general elections, winning 80 seats in parliament, putting them on par with the ultranationalists. That electoral victory was a precedent, undermining Erdogan's authoritarian plans that hinged on converting Turkey to a “presidential” system of government. In return, Erdogan performed a 180-degree on the Kurdish question and began to set into motion a scenario that would enable him to fill the shoes of the dictatorial generals who had once been the object of his scorn. Already, last week, his aides have started to prepare a lawsuit to have the pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (PDP) closed down, and his loyal public prosecution has opened an investigation into PDP co-chairperson Selahattin Dermirtas. The charges are ready to hand: “incitement to violence” at the time of the violent demonstrations triggered by the IS siege against Kobani in autumn 2014. If parliament votes to strip him of his immunity, Dermirtas could be brought to trial and face a sentence of up to 24 years in prison for breaking an article of the Turkish penal code prohibiting incitement to violence. The other PDP co-chairperson, Figen Yuksekdag, is being charged with “promoting a terrorist organisation” on the basis of remarks she made two weeks ago to the effect that she supports the PPU and the Women's Protection Units (WPU) which are fighting IS in Syria. The PPU and WPU are military units of the Syrian Democratic Union Party (DUP), an offshoot of the PKK. The prosecutor's actions are a translation of Erdogan's call earlier last week to lift immunity from and punish parliamentary deputies who support the PKK. The developments point to a single purpose: to eliminate the Kurdish political role or at least to keep them from crossing the parliamentary threshold again in a next round of polls. Erdogan, his heart still set on an imperial throne, is doing all in his power to set the stage for early elections and to generate a climate in which his party the JDP can reverse the losses it sustained on 7 June and regain a parliamentary majority. Whether he can actually succeed in this scheme is another question. Certainly Turkey's Western allies are disturbed by the lengths to which Erdogan is willing to go to engineer a parliament that will produce the constitutional amendments needed to secure all the reins of power in his hands. Comparing the current situation in Turkey to that which prevailed in the 1990s, Leela Jacinto, in Foreign Policy, suggests that nothing has changed. Last week's developments, she writes, “exposed Turkish inflexibility on the Kurdish issue, regardless of whether there's a military dictator, a Kemalist, or an Islamist in power.” But this time, Erdogan appears to be “taking his country to war in order to win an election.” His gambit may not succeed. As Jacinto wrote: “Erdogan's weakness in perceiving and acting on the militant Islamist threat has not won him extra friends on the security-first right. His autocratic Islamist style is losing him support on the left. And as for the Kurdish vote, well, he can just forget about it.” In other words, Erdogan may have made “the biggest miscalculation of his political career” It remains to be seen whether this will usher in Scene 2 of the end of JDP hegemony and the departure of its power-hungry leader.
