While the presence of DTP in Parliament might be a ‘golden opportunity’ for a democratic push to end separatist terrorism, any success depends on DTP understanding the difference between legality and illegality.
It appears that the relationship between separatist chieftain Abdullah Öcalan serving a life sentence on his private Imrali prison island, the separatist gang headquartered in the Kandil mountains in northern Iraq and continue heinous cross-border terrorist attacks in Turkey and the Democratic Society Party (DTP) is far more organic and close than what most of us ever thought of. That bitter reality started to sink in very badly.
People who believe in democracy and who defend that remedies could be found to all problems within democracy, often defend that the more diverse the views and political tendencies represented in a Parliament, the smaller the probability for such political tendencies getting organized in the underground. That is, we were often stressing that it is up to a country to choose whether to have a legal opposition, or fight terrorists in the mountains.
The ten percent electoral threshold in Turkey's election law is definitely anti-democratic and though it was never admitted by those who placed that clause in the law and those who have been so reluctant in the past decades to remove or bring it down to a more reasonable level compatible with the European average, we all knew that the aim behind the practice was to keep the “unwanted elements” – the Kurds, the socialists, the minority views and such – outside the Parliament.
The last minute alliance of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Republican People's Party (CHP) to put an end to the practice of separate ballot paper for independent candidates and to list them under the parties in the joint ballot paper was an anti-democratic development aimed at reducing the chance of independents making into Parliament.
Despite all odds, independent candidates sponsored by the DTP achieved an incredible success in the July 22 polls and entered Parliament with a sufficient number to establish a parliamentary group. This was achieved against all the unfavorable legal and psychological factors.
Of course Parliament is rather new, and has spent the past several weeks in establishing its speakership council and electing a president. Perhaps, after Parliament returns from recess on Oct. 1 we will see the DTP and some other democrats in Parliament raising the anti-democratic elements in the elections law. Perhaps there is no need for hurried approach on such issues.
DTP must read the July 22 results well
However, the DTP did not spare any effort since the election results were announced in demonstrating its solidarity with what the new deputies describe as “our brothers” on the mountains. Legality and illegality cannot exist together. How can it happen that people who engaged in a race and get elected to the Parliament can talk about terrorists as “brothers” and underline in repeated statements that “Declaring PKK as terrorist means cursing at our own people.”
While reports from Sapanca – where some senior AKP members and a group of academicians working on a draft “civilian constitution” – indicate that the AKP has started to understand that it cannot touch the “founding principles” of the Turkish Republic and the first four articles of the current constitutional text are “untouchable,” the DTP has started conditioning its support to the civilian constitution to inclusion of education, political campaigning and such in Kurdish (besides Turkish) and to the rewording of the citizenship in a manner stripping it from “Turkish ethnicity.”
Independents supported by the DTP won 4.2 percent of the vote in the July 22 elections. The AKP was far more successful in constituencies that the DTP or the pro-Kurdish political movements in Turkey have always believed to be dominated by ethnic Kurdish citizens. Should not this result mean something to the DTP? Should it not be considered as a message by the DTP, as well as the chieftain at the İmralı prison and the gang on Kandil mountains in northern Iraq that not only ethnic Turks in the region and elsewhere in the country condemn terrorism, but ethnic Kurds are equally fed up with it and want a peaceful life?While the presence of DTP in Parliament might be a “golden opportunity” for a democratic push for an end to separatist terrorism, any success unfortunately depends on DTP understanding the difference between legality and illegality and moving to conform with legality. Working for the improvement of living conditions of people in their constituencies and elsewhere in Turkey and striving to contribute to the enhancement of democracy and individual rights is what we expect from our deputies. It is just impossible to be a terrorist and a parliamentarian at the same time. People elected to legislate laws cannot defend illegality.