The reconciliation process, which aims to end the 30-year embedded civil war between the Turkish state and the separatist PKK, is undergoing a major crisis. The process that started in December 2012 came to a de facto end following a series of terrorist attacks last week. The concrete development that fomented this crisis was a terrorist attack that took place in Suruç on July 20 in a southeastern province located on Turkey's border with Syria with a predominantly Kurdish population. A total of 32 people lost their lives during the attack and more than 100 were injured. The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has been blamed for the attack. Following the Suruç massacre, the PKK - the Turkish affiliate of the Syrian Democratic Union Party (PYD), whose armed People's Protection Units (YPG) are fighting ISIS to achieve territorial dominance in northern Syria - carried out a series of terror acts on the grounds that took the lives of PKK sympathizers. Oddly enough, however, the PKK directed these attacks toward the Turkish state, rather than ISIS. First, two police officers were brutally murdered in their home. Then a traffic officer and a major were killed. During the hours I was writing this article, wire services reported that a soldier was killed while he was withdrawing money from an ATM while on leave. As the terrorist attacks - all of which the PKK claims responsibility for - continued, members of the organization's legal wing, the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), vandalized streets in big cities. There were also police officers who lost their lives during these attacks and the tension continues to a degree.

Following the massacre, the government announced that it would launch a long-running fight against all terrorist groups including the PKK and ISIS. The Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) launched airstrikes on terror camps as a part of a cross-border operation, and the police initiated consecutive operations inside the country taking around 1,000 suspects into custody. Thus, the cease-fire that was stipulated by the reconciliation process that was declared by former prime minister and current president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in December 2012 and approved by the PKK's imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan, has come to a de facto end. However, it is not possible to work out the situation in light of the past week's developments alone and without touching on events that took place before the cease-fire was broken. First, the PKK did not keep its promise to send its armed militants out of Turkey, which was the first condition of the reconciliation process. Both the organization's staff in the Qandil Mountains and political figures from its legal wing announced many times that the process had ended. For instance, on July 11, just before the crisis broke out last week, PKK commanders declared once again that the cease-fire had ended. It is hard to believe, but they declared it on the grounds that the state is constructing a dam in the region that is predominantly inhabited by Kurds. Speaking at the party's parliamentary group meeting on Tuesday, HDP Co-Chair Selahattin Demirtaş said that he thought the PKK's reason for breaking the cease-fire was totally reasonable.

As pacifist intellectuals and journalists, we have argued for many years that the state should find political solutions rather than military ones to the Kurdish question. During the 1990s, even this demand itself was enough to put the person who verbalized it in prison. For the first time in Turkey's history, a government took the political risk of peace to tackle the Kurdish question. This time, the PKK is resisting the resolution, realizing that it has achieved legitimacy to a point and brings forward preposterous demands such as that the state must end its construction activities in Kurdish areas.

Despite all provocations, the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) reiterates at every occasion that the reconciliation process will not move away from the perspective of peace and brotherhood. Under these circumstances, however, it is difficult to embrace the reconciliation process. This is because a large majority of the public, including Kurds who voted for the HDP in the parliamentary elections, are furious with the PKK and its legal representatives due to the recent incidents, thinking that they were deceived. I hope this deadlock will not be tackled with arms. However, the Kurdish political movement, which wants to engage in politics without abandoning the political comfort of a war environment, is indifferently dragging the country toward this outcome.