An expected outburst in the Kurdish issue

The government has decided to respond very severely to the recent attacks by the PKK by conducting airstrikes on the Qandil Mountains in northern Iraq where the PKK military command is based. This is not very new. The Turkish Air Forces have repeatedly bombed these mountains in northern Iraq, which remain a virtual no man's land despite the fact that there is an autonomous government and administration in Iraqi Kurdistan. Northern Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) President Masoud Barzani, after having been informed of the Turkish Armed Forces strikes on the Qandil Mountain, declared that he was "deeply saddened," but refrained from denouncing the move.

In retaliation, the PKK has opted for a new system of assassinations. Former conflicts mostly took place in rural areas where the mountainous terrain is extremely arduous. Now the PKK has opted for deliberate, carefully planned assassinations of people belonging to Turkish security forces in urban areas. Two police officers were murdered in cold blood while they were sleeping in their apartment. The PKK has endorsed the murder. In a remote town in the southeast, a gendarmerie commander was assassinated in his car while he was driving his wife home. A police officer was notified of a traffic accident, again in the southeast. It was a setup, and when the officer went to see the accident, he has been assassinated by PKK militants.

This looks very much like the kind of planned assassinations perpetrated between 1917 and 1921 by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) against British security officers. During the last three years of nonviolence when Turkish Security Forces did not engage PKK militants in exchange of their departure from the country, or abandoning their weapons if they wanted to remain in the Turkish Republic, has in fact served as a lull in a far more criminal structuring of the PKK. Not only did most of the militants remain in Turkey with their arms, but also this period of non-conflict, which was supposed to prepare a peaceful transition toward more political, social and cultural freedom, has been used by a fraction within the PKK to establish a criminal organization.

It is virtually impossible to explain how a movement continuously referring to a peaceful existence could put in place such a sophisticated killing machine. If it is going to be used as a deterrent to Turkish Security Forces, it has already been tried for almost 30 years without much success. If the Kurdish political movement really wants to find a solution to an outdated conflict, it should also be clear about the motivations of the PKK and its assassinations. A murder syndicate, as it looks the PKK has reorganized itself into, can hardly become a useful instrument to combat in the name of freedom, justice and liberty. The IRA, to take the same example again, has waged a civil war between the Irish people after the founding of the Republic of Ireland. It has been a major obstacle in normalizing relations between the U.K. and the Ulster for decades and basically has surrendered after having obtained almost nothing. For people who do wish to have a democratic Kurdish political movement, the PKK remains the biggest and most dangerous obstacle. So long as the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) does not truly distance itself from the PKK, its voice will not be heard by a large majority of the Turkish public.