Stimulating Turkey’s 3 sore points

It is really thought-provoking that Turkey has been experiencing extraordinary developments since the reconciliation process was launched on Jan. 3, 2013. I would like to make an elaborate list of these developments in light of a news report titled: "Continuous Sabotage of Reconciliation" (Çözüme adım başı sabotaj), which was published in the Turkish Star daily on Oct. 28, 2014.

1. Shortly after the talks with the jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan were made public, a group of around 110 terrorists opened fire on the Karataş military outpost in Hakkari, the zero point of the Turkey-Iraq border, on Jan. 7. The attack resulted in the death of 14 PKK militants and one Turkish soldier.

2. Two days after the attack, on Jan. 9, one of the founders of the PKK, Sakine Cansız and two Kurdish activists, Fidan Doğan and Leyla Söylemez, were murdered at the Kurdish Information Centre in Paris.

3. Around one and a half months after the reconciliation process suffered its third sabotage attempt on Feb. 28 when the Turkish Milliyet daily published a two-page story covering the talks that were held between three members of Parliament from the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) - which later merged under the name of the People's Democratic Party (HDP) - and Öcalan on İmralı Island.

4. The leaking of these notes sparked great outrage among the public and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was prime minister at the time, insisting on the disclosure of those who leaked this information. Thereupon, Selahattin Demirtaş, the co-chair of the BDP, said that it was his party that revealed this information. After this, two members of Parliament, who were involved in the event, resigned and one press agent of the BDP was removed from office.

5. In late May, the Gezi Park protests broke out when Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality uprooted several trees in Taksim only to plant them somewhere else in order to widen pavements. This evolved into a big crisis and a process of disinformation and provocation in 79 cities as well as a coup attempt.

6. On Dec. 17 and Dec. 25 the Gülen Movement's parallel structure, which had infiltrated most of the top echelons of government bureaucracy, including the police force, the judiciary and the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK), attempted to stage a coup under the cloak of a corruption operation, which obviously targeted the upcoming three critical elections.

7. Toward the end of the last legislative year, while the Parliament was addressing the reconciliation law, various incidents erupted in the raid sequence. PKK members were engaged in such activities as intercepting and identification control, but worse still, their self-styled security forces staged a show of strength in the streets. They made a further attempt to pour salt in the wound by targeting a very vulnerable point of Turkish society by taking down a Turkish flag at an air force base in the southeastern province of Diyarbakır.

8. The most important of all provocations was the recent unrest caused by PKK members who were unhappy with the government's position on Kobani. They poured into the streets with the HDP's call turning them into a battlefield which resulted in the death of 40 people, while eight others were heavily lynched.

All of these events occurred at such a critical time when the draft law of the three-stage reconciliation process, whose ultimate step was to disarm the PKK, was proclaimed in the Official Gazette and the talks with Öcalan had gained speed.

Following these, PKK militants attacked a dam in the Kağızman district of the eastern Kars province where three of them were killed, whereupon three Turkish soldiers in plain clothes were shot dead by masked assailants in Hakkari's Yüksekova district.

All of this occurred even though Öcalan displayed resolution on the peace process, calling everyone to avoid provocation and suggesting that suspicious events should be investigated.

It is blatantly obvious that these incidents were staged to exacerbate the three sore points of Turkey: The secularist sensitivity aroused in the Gezi incidents; the religious sensitivity evoked in the Dec. 17 and Dec. 25 operations and the Kurdish-Alevi sensitivity awakened in the incidents that took place on Oct. 6 and 7. They all targeted the reconciliation process which would upgrade Turkish democracy. Actually, all three of these cases aimed to fuel a civil war by arousing three vulnerable points of society at the same time, however, the government pursued an effective crisis management procedure and the public was not deceived by these provocations. But, their attempts to wage civil war will continue and they won't stop until Turkey succumbs to its old tutelage regime once again. One needs to be blind not to see this.