'May You Live In Interesting Times'

There is a Chinese proverb that could be considered a curse: “May you live in interesting times.” It is as though Turkey has been cursed because it is going through interesting times. As the lack of confidence in the settlement process resurfaces, it has become evident that the process was strategic for one party and tactical for the other. There is a visible increase in the number of incidents that remind us of the critical times of the 1990s.

Violence has not stopped in the aftermath of the Oct. 6-7 incidents. First, three soldiers were killed in Yüksekova. Recently, a non-commissioned officer was murdered in Diyarbakır. A truck full of explosives was taken to the mountain in Silopi. The pro-Kurdish movement is under a lot of public pressure and to address this, they are offering some remedies.

What has happened and why has the settlement process almost stopped at a time when people feel that the pro-Kurdish movement has at least made some tangible moves to integrate with Turkey, particularly considering Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) Co-chairman Selahattin Demirtaş's performance and messages during the presidential election process?

The HDP immediately responded to the government's statement that they do not have to remain committed to the settlement process by stating that they have to remain committed. This discourse sounds good but if we are to remain committed to the process, how do we explain the violent protests on Oct. 6-7?

Based on the address by Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu to the wise men, we conclude that a roadmap drafted in September had been endorsed by İmralı, Kandil and the HDP, so how should we explain this growing violence?

The roadmap of the settlement process suggested that the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) would first withdraw from Turkish territory and there would then be attempts to integrate PKK militants with social and political life in Turkey once they returned unarmed. It seems that the PKK is not ready for such a solution. And for this reason, they made different preparations to sabotage the final stage of this process. They created a huge organization and network to ensure the mobilization of thousands of people on the streets in a show of riot. This is a threat to public order and it appears that there has been no negotiation between the parties to address this.

Most probably, the government viewed the settlement process as a process that would normalize the entire Kurdish movement because they believed that the pro-Kurdish movement did not have another plan. But it can now be clearly seen that the PKK/HDP had a different plan other than the settlement process. And this plan is not based on a tactical foundation; I believe it has some strategic calculations.

The democratic process in Turkey does not raise any hopes for the PKK, which is aware that the outcome of the settlement process will not result in an autonomous territory that they would be able to control. The settlement process was just a cover to guarantee the safety of Kobani and Rojava. This process was successfully used to attain this goal and when it came to the roadmap that the government and PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan agreed on, everything changed.

ORHAN MİROĞLU (Cihan/Today's Zaman)