Twelve more inmates have joined the hunger strike twelve PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) prisoners in Van F Type Closed Prison started on 13 May.

The indeffinite-irreversible hunger strike was started to protest against the violations of prisoners' rights and the ill-treatment prisoners are subjected to by the administration.

The Prison Commission of Van Bar Association, TUYAD-DER and BDP (Peace and Democracy Party) Van deputy Özdal Üçer have met the prisoners on strike, asking them to end their protest but the talks remained inconclusive.

Ahmet Aygün, Chairperson of TUYAD-DER Van Branch, said they were continuing their talks with the public prosecutor of Van as well as with the prosecutor and administrator of Van F Type Closed Prison with an aim to ensure the fulfillment of the demands highlighted by prisoners on strike.

Source: ANF, Van

In a written statement on recent clashes in Aleppo, West Kurdistan People's Defense Forces (YPG) Press Office said that nine soldiers of the Syrian army were killed in clashes in the Kurdish neighborhood of Sheik Maksoud on Wednesday.

YPG Press Office said that severe clashes broke out in the region of Al Ewarid as soldiers of the Syrian army attacked and attempted to enter the neighborhood which is controlled by YPG units.

YPG added that two military vehicles of Syrian army were also destroyed in clashes.

Source: ANF, Aleppo

A delegation of DTK (Democratic Society Congress) and HDK (People's Democratic Congress) Women's Council members has paid a visit to the families of Roboski victims who were killed in a bombardment by Turkish warplanes on 28 December 2011. The delegation also joined the families' weekly vigil for justice at the graveyard where victims are buried.

The delegation from Amed visited Roboski families after joining the vigil in the Democratic Liberation and Solution tent women put up in Şırnak under the leadership of Democratic Free Women's Movement (Demokratik Özgür Kadın Hareketi – DÖKH). The women joining the tent vigil in Şırnak, as well as those in Dersim and Hakkari, are monitoring the ongoing process of withdrawal of Kurdish guerrillas across Turkish borders.

After the weekly vigil in the graveyard, the delegation held a meeting with Roboski families. "The Kurdish question cannot be resolved unless light is shed on the Roboski massacre", families said and asked the delegation to provide support for the disclore of the truth on Roboski massacre. The delegation said the Women's Council of DTK and HDK will prepare a Roboski Report and present it to the parliamentary groups of BDP (Peace and Democracy Party), CHP (Republican People's Party) and AKP (Justice and Development Party).

The delegation also held debates with the public about the ongoing process of HPG guerrillas' withdrawal.

Source: ANF, Şırnak

The military prosecutor’s office of Turkish General Staff has finalized its investigation into the alleged use of chemical weapons in Kazan Valley (Geliyê Tiyarê) where 36 HPG (People's Defense Forces) guerrillas were killed in clashes in Çukurca district of Hakkari on October 22-24, 2011.

The military prosecutor’s office had launched the investigation upon the criminal complaint the families of the 34 guerrillas filed on 6 December 2011 after they saw burns, color change and no bullet holes on the bodies of the guerrillas killed here.

In a statement on the finalized investigation, the prosecutor’s office said that no chemical weapon but 'standard conventional ammunition' was used in the operation against HPG guerrillas. The office also ruled lack of grounds for legal action.

HPG guerrilla Nupelda Engin, who spoke to ANF after surviving the operation in Kazan Valley, said that they had suffered from great nausea, sore throat and suffocation feeling and had difficulty in walking after the bombs were dropped in the area, spreading a smell resembling the smell of fruit and milk.

Engin remarked that “We were unable to breath, we began to feel sick and dizzy while shootings went on. We could hardly move and walk until we reached a watery area and were able to protect ourselves there for two days from the smell spreading in the area.”

The areas targeted were under the control of guerrillas, noted Engin and added that “We waited for the enemy for two days but they didn’t come. Our comrades had been wounded but they died because of the chemicals that are still in the area.”

A delegation of IHD (Human Rights Association) Hakkari Branch, BDP (Peace and Democracy Party) provincial organization members and families of HPG guerrillas, who went to Kazan Valley one week after the operation, found body parts in the clashes area. Villagers in the area told them that HPG guerrillas had died in the caves hit by napalm bombs dropped during the clashes. Villagers also remarked that after the clashes the bodies of guerrillas had been taken from the area with diggers and many bodies were torn to pieces.

Making a statement after the survey, IHD Hakkari Branch Chair İsmail Akbulut said that “there were only 24 bodies in Malatya's morgue while about 30 guerrillas lost their lives during the clashes in the valley. Six of the guerrillas - parts of their bodies in fact - were still in the operations area.

Source: ANF, Ankara

Kurdish Red Crescent in Efrin distributed medicines to the Rajo Health Centre in order to amend the difficult humanitarian situation there, especially after tens of thousands citizens were displaced from Aleppo to Efrin.

Derbasye- The first batch of medical staff in Derbasye was graduated, including 40 people (males and females) who had passed their health education course under the supervision of the Kurdish Red Crescent.

Al Hassake- as a result of mass migration of doctors from Al Hassake and due to the disability of the hospitals to receive emergency aid, a group of doctors took an initiative by opening a health centre under the supervision of the Supreme Kurdish Council. The health centre includes several departments like children / infant diseases dept., gynaecology dept. and internal diseases dept.

Source: ANF, Rajo

There are more than 100,000 casualties caused by the current war in Syria. Of these at least 15,000 are children according to Human Rights Organizations. The number of refugees was estimated at around 4 million 25 thousand. One and half million of them are in neighbouring countries.

Source: ANF, News Desk

The initiative ‘’ Freedom for Ocalan’’ inWestern Kurdistan has issued a statement to the public opinion. It has announced the start of a campaign that will collect 1 million 300 thousand signatures in Western Kurdistan and Syria. The initiative confirmed that the campaign won’t be limited to only Kurdish people, but it will include all segments of the Syrian people.

Source: ANF, Qamishlo

Diyarbakır 8th High Criminal Court has sentenced former editor in chief of Kurdish daily Azadiya Welat, İbrahim Güvenç, to ten years three months and 22 days in prison for allegedly spreading propaganda on the sixth issue of the daily. Güvenç was also served with a pecuniary penalty of 16,500 TL.

Azadiya Welat's current editor in chief, Aydın Atar, is also being tried by Diyarbakır 8th High Criminal Court on the grounds of spreading propaganda for an illegal organization. Atar's trial is still going on.

Source: ANF, Amed/Diyarbakır

9th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON

"THE EUROPEAN UNION, TURKEY AND THE KURDS"

Brussels (B), European Parliament, 5th & 6th December, 2012

Rethinking Politics and Democracy in the Middle East

Presentation by: Joost Jongerden

A few weeks ago I was in Istanbul, and in order to have something to read on my flight back to Amsterdam, I bought the new book by Cengiz Candar, Mezopotamya Ekspresi. The book is a quick read and rich in detail, and there is one general message that I would like to share as my contribution today. It is that we should call things by their name. To underline this Candar refers to Jose Saramago, winner of the 1998 Nobel prize for literature: “Words”, he says, “were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts.” For Candar, calling things by their name is not to talk about the Kurdish issue in covert terms, but to call it the Kurdish issue. He also shows rather well how prime-minister Erdogan, after an initial opening in which he called things by their name, started to conceal the issue again: the Kurdish Opening became the Brotherhood and National Unity Project, and hope turned into disillusionment. Let me explain me briefly how I take this message into my talk for today Taking as a point of departure the idea that words should not be used to conceal thoughts, but to express them, I will make clear from the outset that I have an interest in the way that new forms of politics and a rethinking of the concept of democracy is taking place in the context of organisations which are usually associated with the Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK. I could discuss this without making explicit reference to the PKK, but I too prefer to call things by their name. Furthermore, I think that we should take the PKK seriously as a political organisation, that we should get away from the one-dimensional and one-sided rhetoric of “terrorism” with which the PPK has been labelled, that we should do away with this aspect of America’s post-9-11 discourse that Europe bought into, and that we need instead to politicise a debate which has been securitised: in short, we need to demilitarise politics (Cizre 2009: 3). It was the militarization of politics that brought crisis to the state in the first place, as I will explain.

Today, looking at the Middle East, through and beyond the dust and smoke of war, new forms of politics and democracy are being shaped in social practices and by social experimentation. I am referring to the people’s councils that have been established in various places in the Kurdistan region, such as in Derik (in Syria) and Diyarbakir (in Turkey), and through which people are taking greater responsibility for and control of their daily lives and the places where they live. Those involved refer to these councils in the context of ‘democratic autonomy’ and ‘democratic confederalism’, which indicates that they are not simply to be considered as just local initiatives, but also contribute to a larger project or idea and way of thinking about and doing politics. We may not fully comprehend this form of politics, yet this should challenge academics and those interested in developing new forms of democracy, to have a closer look. Outside of the Kurdish movement, the concepts of democratic confederalism and democratic autonomy are mostly ignored or just unknown. Within the movement itself, the concepts are not unquestioned. It is true that the concepts of democratic confederalism and democratic autonomy may sound incomprehensible from the perspective of established political vocabularies. In such vocabularies, autonomy is not defined in terms of the competences (Illich 1977) or practices (Negri 1984) of people, or as the development of commons (Hardt & Negri 2009), but as legal arrangements. Because it is impossible to measure the new initiatives in judicial or statist terms, therefore, we have to be careful not to judge them as inadequate on basis of old vocabularies. The challenge therefore is not to prejudge and dismiss experiments as unviable because they sound strange and unfamiliar, or flat reject them because they are formulated by an actor we may not like or may not want to be associated with, but to try to understand the way these new thoughts are being developed and new forms practiced. To learn from them, in all their complexity and incoherence (Gibson-Graham 2008: 618). The aim of my contribution today, therefore, is to take a closer look at democratic confederalism and democratic autonomy and explore them as possible examples of a new way of doing politics. I will look at these two concepts, or should I say practices, in the context of a wider debate about new forms of democracy, a debate which does take place within academia, and also in wider society. There are many reasons to take a closer look at new forms of politics and democracy. The explosion of violence in the Middle East is a symptom of what I see there as a crisis of the state. In the much cited definition by Weber (1919), the state is to be considered an entity, an institution, or a system of institutions, that successfully claims the monopoly or legitimate use of violence in a specific territory. Although this monopoly of legitimate violence may define the state, however, systematic application of this potentially undermines it. When a state needs to turn to repertoires of violence in a generalised way, it may lose the virtue of its functional competence and thus legitimacy. Then, government becomes the ongoing exercise of power though violence, and violence a condition for the functioning of state institutions (Hardt & Negri 2004: 14, 21). This, in the words of Walter Benjamin (1940), we may refer to as the state of emergency becoming norm, not an exception but the rule. This rule has been tormenting the Kurdistan region – in Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran – for decades. In Turkey, repressive measures continue to be employed in response to what is still regarded as an existential threat to the republic: the expression of Kurdish identity and the quest for civil rights and citizenship. While the bases of the PKK are being attacked from the air and on the ground, otherwise legal organisations engaged in a struggle for “the right to have rights” for Kurds are being hampered, restricted and closed down, their members investigated, detained and imprisoned. All this is an expression of the problem of the securitisation of politics, and actually an inversion of the proposition of Von Clausewitz: politics has become the continuation of war. War is no longer the limited state of exception, but has become the rule (Hardt & Negri 2004: 6), the production of a single identity population, the ultimate aim of the nation-state, transformed into a war against the population. The problem I want to engage with, however, is not the problem of the state but the problem of how to think of government beyond the state. In 1991, the libertarian socialist Murray Bookchin wrote that ‘Perhaps the greatest single failing of movements for social reconstruction’, referring in particular to the left and organisations that claim to speak for the oppressed, ‘is their lack of a politics that will carry people beyond the limits established by the status quo’ (Bookchin 1991: 3). For Bookchin such a social reconstruction had to reach beyond the focus of statecraft and market (Bookchin, 1990: 13; 1991: 7). Today, in the Kurdish movement, interestingly but barely observed, social reconstruction is indeed one of the principle issues discussed.

This idea of social reconstruction is currently being considered within the various circles of the Kurdish movement as a project of radical democracy. It is radical in the sense that it tries to develop the concept of democracy beyond nation and state, and tries to do so in three projects: one for the democratic republic, one for democratic-confederalism and one for democratic-autonomy. As I understand it, the idea of a democratic republic refers to citizenship rights, and as such is still linked to the idea of the state, but the concepts of democratic autonomy and democratic confederalism link to what we may refer to as autonomous capacities of people, a more direct, less representative form of political structure. Democratic autonomy refers to practices in which people produce and reproduce the necessary and desired conditions for living through direct engagement and collaboration with one another. This is referred to as ‘self-valorisation’ in autonomist Marxist literature (Cleaver 1992). Democratic confederalism can be characterised as a bottom-up system for selfgovernment. And it is this that I would like to focus upon in the remainder of this contribution. When I met a local party leader of the Kurdish BDP in Diyarbakir, he told me that the project of democratic-confederalism is developed as an ‘alternative to capitalism, which historically found its ideological, organisational and political expression in the nation-state’, and also as a replacement for the collapsed model of what used to be ‘real existing socialism’, which had ‘failed to develop political alternatives’. As a paradigm, the local party leader told us, democratic-confederalism is not oriented towards the taking over of state-power, or even focussing on the state, but on ‘developing alternative forms of power through selforganisation.’ When the Kurdish PYD-YPG forces ousted the Baath regime in northern Syria, or west Kurdistan, local councils popped up everywhere. Developed under the umbrella of democratic confederalism, these councils had been active already as a parallel structure of government to that of the state, organizing justice and mediating in conflict, but with the collapse of the state, they came out into the open. They started to organise social life, and its defence, and were able to give shape to such basic social services as education and health-care. It was the imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan who initiated debates on democratic autonomy and democratic confederalism among Kurds, and he did so on the basis of Murray Bookchin’s word. Bookchin differentiates between two ideas of politics, the Hellenic model and the Roman model, which gave rise to two different imaginaries of politics and understandings of government. The first, the Hellenic model, stands for a participatorydemocratic form of politics, and the second, the Roman model, for a centralist and statist form (White 2008: 159). The Roman model, the argument goes, has become the dominant form in modern society, informing the American and French constitutionalists of the 18th century, while the Athens model exists as a counter- and underground current, finding expression in the Paris Commune of 1871, the councils (soviets) in the spring-time of the revolution in Russia in 1917, and the Spanish Revolution in 1936. The statist, centralised Roman model has a herd of subjects (Kropotkin 1897), but the Hellenic model an active citizenship (Bookchin, 1990: 11). Bookchin projects his political imaginary for the recovery of humans as citizens onto the idea of confederalism, defined as ‘a network of administrative councils whose members are elected from popular face-to-face democratic alliances, in the various villages, towns, and even neighbourhoods of large cities.’ According to Bookchin (1990), confederalism reaches its fullest development in relation to a project of autonomy, ‘when placing local farms, factories, and other enterprises in local municipal hands’, or, ‘when a community (…) begins to manage its own economic resources in an interlinked way with other communities’ (ibid: 11). In this model, the economy is placed in the custody of the confederal councils, and thus ‘neither collectivized nor privatized, it is common’ (ibid: 10). As such, confederalism and autonomy are key-notions in Bookchin’s ‘radically new configuration of society’ (ibid: 4), and they are also key-notions in the Kurdish movement today. Influenced by these ideas, Öcalan developed a similar understanding of confederalism. In parallel to his historical analysis of civilisation based on the critique of the state, Öcalan condemned the failure of real socialism and national liberation movements, which were considered to be trapped in the ideas of the state and state-making. Thus, since 2005, the PKK and all affiliated organisations have been restructured on the basis of this project under the name of the KCK (Koma Civakên Kurdistan, the Association of Communities in Kurdistan), a societal organisation presented as an alternative to the nation-state. Aiming to organise itself from the bottom up in the form of assemblies, the KCK defined itself as ‘a movement which struggles to establish its own democracy, neither grounded on the existing nation-states nor seeing them as the obstacle’ (PKK, 2005: 175). In its founding text, the ‘KCK Contract’, its main aim is defined in terms of a struggle for the expansion of a radical democracy that is based upon peoples’ democratic organisations and decision-making power. In Diyarbakir I have met with several people active in councils, women and men. And they sounded quit self-confident. ‘Our aim’, explained the chair of a council in one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the city, ‘is to face the problems in our lives, in our neighbourhood, and solve them by ourselves without being dependent on or in need of the state’. Others added, ‘The state is a hump on the back of the people,’ and ‘We try to live without the state’. However, they tempered, ‘the idea of the state is nestled in the minds of people and it is difficult to make people think about politics without making reference to the state, so we are both practising self-organisation as well as learning to understand what it is by doing it’. This is democracy in action. This is also self-determination in a new form, namely, based on the capacities and capabilities of people themselves. Did these councils function well? No, they did not. Apart from series of specific, practical problems, many of those involved have been arrested in the course of the Turkish state’s KCK operations over the last years. Even though the actions are by no means criminal, they have been labelled as ‘terrorist’. Contrary to that, they could very well fit Turkish initiatives in participatory democracy, such as the Local Agenda 21, or initiatives in participatory budgeting and active citizenship, which have been experimented with in Çanakkale (Akman 2009). And clearly, not on the merits or demerits of the initiatives themselves, which are based on the idea of active citizenship, but because of their association with the PKK, which knee-jerk determines the reaction of the state. This, I would say, is a missed opportunity for a political solution to the conflict. Though there is still much to say, I shall finish now. The account of democraticconfederalism, and the possibility that it may embody a paradigm shift in politics may sound utopian. And it is! Democracy in any form is indeed an ideal, toward which to strive. As Eduardo Galeano put it, ‘Utopia is on the horizon: when I walk two steps, it takes two steps back… I walk ten steps, and it is ten steps further away. What is utopia for? It is for this, for walking.’ We need to walk. Walking can take us out of the entrenched positions, which have caused so much bloodshed already. Thank you for listening.

References

Akman, Hale Evrim (2009) Participatory Budgeting in Çanakkale, Turkey, in OECD, Focus on Citizens: Public

Engagement for Better Policy and Services, OECD Publishing. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264048874-14-en

Benjamin, Walter (1940) On the Concept of History (Theses on the Philosophy of History). Available at

www.leedstrinity.ac.uk/depart/media/staff/ls/WBenjamin/CONCEPT2.html.

Bookchin, Murray (1990) The Meaning of Confederalism, in: Green Perspectives, Issue 20, November 1990;

Republished in Society and Nature, vol.1, No.3.

Bookchin, Murray (1991) Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview, in Green Perspectives, Issue 24, October  1991.

Cizre,Umit (2009) The Emergence of the ‘Government’s Perspective’ on the Kurdish issue,” Insight Turkey Vol. 11, no. 2.

Cleaver, Harry (1993) Kropotkin, self-valorisation, and the crisis of Marxism, Anarchist Studies, edited by

Thomas V. Cahill, Department of Politics, Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom, February24

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2004) Multitude. New York: The Penguen press.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2009) Commonwealth, Cambridge: Harvard University Press

Illich, Ivan, Irving Kenneth Zola, John McKnight, Jonathan Caplan, Harley Shaiken (1977) Disabling Professions,                                                                                          London: Marion  Boyars

Kropotkin, Peter (1897) The State: It’s historical role. Available at http://www.panarchy.org/kropotkin/1897.state.html

Negri, Antonio (1984) Marx beyond Marx, Lessons on the Grundrisse. New York: Bergen and Garvey White, Damian F. (2008)  Bookchin: A Critical Appraisal. London: Pluto Press.

PKK. (2005) Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan PKK Yeniden Inşa Kongre Belgeleri. Istanbul: Çetin Yayinlari.

9th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON

"THE EUROPEAN UNION, TURKEY AND THE KURDS"

Brussels (B), European Parliament, 5th & 6th December, 2012

“Negotiating peace: Requirements for a political resolution

and the Road Maps to Peace in Turkey”

Presentation by: Dr. Sabine Freizer

Europe Program Director, International Crisis Group

INTRODUCTION

Thank you very much chair for inviting me to speak to you today and to present the recommendations that the International Crisis Group has developed to alleviate the Kurdish problem and help the Kurdish movement and the Turkish government reach a political settlement.

Just a few words on Crisis Group. We were created in 1995 during the wars in the Western Balkans when several international policy makers felt that an organization that could give practical recommendations, based on field research, to alleviate and solve deadly conflict was needed. The head of our organization is Justice Louise Arbour, former UN High Commission on HR and Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. We work in about 65 conflicts around the work with some 150 staff. Our main advantage over other organizations is our field presence with about 30 offices around the world. Personally I cover the Europe program (the Balkans, Turkey and the Caucasus, North and South) and am based out of Istanbul, where I work with two other colleagues, Hugh Pope and Didem Akyel. Our only product is our reports – we don’t do any of our own activities, like organizing conferences or providing aid.

We have written three reports on the Kurdish issue. The first was published in September 2011 and was entitled Turkey: Ending the PKK Insurgency, the second was published this September under the title Turkey: the PKK and a Kurdish Settlement and the last just came out last week and was on Diyarbakir. [I have a few copies if you are interested].

In all three of these reports we point a very worrying picture of the situation on the ground in Turkey. We are witnessing the worst casualties since Ocalan capture in 1999. We calculate that at least 870 people have been killed since June 2011, about 500 this year. I also work on the North Caucasus – Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, Ingushetia – and the numbers of deaths are similar, though of course there the population is much smaller.

Regrettably, in Turkey there seems to be a strong tolerance for the current level of violence amongst the government and the PKK. The violence re-started once the Democratic Opening ended in 2009. There are hard statements at leadership level. On govt side, ‘no Kurdish problem’, as if military solution possible. On the Kurdish movement side, major leaders – Cemil Bayik, “the time of armed struggle hasn’t ended.” Bahoz Erdal “who can talk of a ceasefire?” Duran Kalkan “we’re on the way to a military solution”.

Many of the previous speakers have already talked about the abuses and violations that are occurring on the ground, the thousands of arrests, the military and terrorist attacks, and the polarization that we are witnessing in society. Clearly there is severe underreporting in the Turkish press on the violence, be it the deaths of ethnic Kurds or Turks.

But is there now any real chance for negotiating peace? In two important ways the situation is more difficult than it was in 1999 or even in 2009.

The domestic environment: Presidential elections in 2014 are certainly a factor. The political agenda in Ankara is now focused on this, not reforms or the EU process or even much about foreign policy. The Turkish prime minister has adopted more nationalist rhetoric in part to sway the MHP into supporting his plans to amend the constitution and create a powerful Presidency in the Republic. He also seems to have calculated that nationalism is more likely to get him votes than progressive politics. He must believe that there is little chance for him to get a bigger slice of the Kurdish vote than the AKP already has.

The international circumstances: Turkey is much weaker in its neighborhood than it was just a few years ago. The idea of a “zero problem foreign policy” which was initially heralded in Turkey but also in Brussels is now the subject of some ridicule. Despite its strong statements, on Syria for example, Turkey is increasingly looking like the emperor without clothes. On the other hand, the PKK feels empowered. As others have explained there is talk and real signs of Kurds throughout the region uniting, flexing their muscles, and showing their ability to self-govern.

THE EXPERIENCE FROM THE REGION

The situation risks spiraling out of control. There is an urgent need to start implementing comprehensive series of reforms to rebuilt trust and confidence that a political solution to the conflict is doable.

Let me stop here and share a story with you. Last week in Istanbul I was talking to a group of students – Turkish, foreigners, a Kurdish woman -- at BilgiUniversity about conflicts in Europe. I gave them the examples of Kosovo-Serbia, Nagorno Karabakh (the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan) and Macedonia. I choose these examples because I wanted to show them the different options for a settlement.

In the Kosovo case: the solution was a unilateral declaration of independence. Kosovo is now recognized by over 90 countries. But it still requires recognition by Serbia to gets its full international personality and UN membership – now it does not have its own postal code, Olympic team or even access to European green card car insurance.

In the Nagorno-Karabakh case: there is still no solution and there is a high chance of war between Armenia and Azerbaijan which could also pull in Turkey and Russia. If you are Azerbaijan you consider that Nagorno-Karabakh is occupied, if you are Armenia you think that it has expressed its right to self-determination. But it is not recognized by anyone and lives in complete limbo since 1994.

Kosovo which has largely been a success in terms of independence, and Nagorno-Karabakh which has not, demonstrate the difficulties of any solution which is based on UDI – unilateral declaration of independence.

Now the third case that I discussed Macedonia – also has its problems, there are still fights between ethnic Macedonians and Albanians in the country – but it is also a country that [despite a very different but serious problem with Greece regarding its name] has made tremendous progress since 2001 when the war there stopped.

It has succeeded to secure peace by implementing the Ohrid Agreement which provides significant rights to the approximately 20 percent ethnic Albanians: right to schools in mother tongue (including a university), significant decentralization and powers to local municipalities, and fair distribution of positions to Albanians in governmental institutions (ex ministries). Today an ethnic Albanian party is even part of the governing coalition – the Minister for Europe is ethnicAlbanian.

For me, looking for a political resolution to the conflict in Turkey, Macedonia offers elements that we should be focusing on and trying to make relevant to the local situation. This should be feasible in Turkey.

The leadership in the PKK and the government is not doing enough to promote this option: even though it would not be so difficult to do. Most Kurds do not want an independent state, they just want justice and a fair deal. Most Turks are not against giving Kurds right to use their mother tongue or recognizing their identity. There are some causes for hope and there are officials in Ankara who get the full picture now. The fact is that both sides cannot really live without each other

THE RECOMMENDATIONS

Four things to do. Mother language, political representation, decentralization, end of discrimination in laws and constitution, including those that help keep thousands of activists in jail for years at a time. Some are harder than others to do in practice.

Amongst ethnic Turks there’s a lot of suspicion that the Kurds are asking for an inch but want an arm. Among Kurds there is a belief that the government is using salami tactics, giving too little too late.

So instead we need a comprehensive set of reforms – a real conflict resolution strategy.

The government is still by far the strongest party, must set the tone. Must show more courage in the past, must plan what it wants thoroughly, must sell the policy.

KM must also clarify what it wants. Lack of transparency just makes mainstream Turkey think that it’s not being transparent.. The KM must stop its efforts to create a parallel government or seek for PKK insurgents to overnight become self-defence militia. This is for the demobilization stage, but when it comes, the Kurdish movement has a point that a settlement has to include thinking through what happens to the Village Guards.

More specifically at Crisis Group we are recommending:

The government should continue with its steps to make the use of mother tongue more open. Its offer to start with elective courses in schools should not be rebuffed but seen as a first step to full access to education in Kurdish languages. The government should plan ways for Kurdish to find its place in all aspects of public life in Kurdish-speaking areas, schools, municipalities, courts and business life.

In its effort to pass a new Constitution, the government should remove articles that could be seen as discriminating on the basis of ethnicity, mainly due to the way the word “Turkish” can mean both “citizen of Turkey” and “someone of Turkish racial ethnicity”.

The government should remove the 10 per cent electoral threshold required for

a party to enter parliament, to at most 5 per cent, and the bar for state support for national parties which is currently at 7 per cent of the national vote. It should also treat the BDP as a real counterpart in Parliament and stop threatening its MPs with lifting of their immunity.

The government should also change the Anti-Terror Law, Penal Code and other legislation to end the practices of indefinite pre-trial detention and prosecution of thousands of peaceful Kurdish movement activists as “terrorists”, and ensure that non-violent discussion of Kurdish issues is not punished by law.

And finally especially within the context of constitutional change, if a stronger presidential system is seriously being considered, the government should open a debate on decentralization and stronger municipal governance.

None of this is going to be easy but delaying is an even worse option. Erdogan has almost unlimited power now. No elections for two years. The regional situation is likely only going to get worse. If Turkey feels vulnerable to events in Syria, it must secure its position by anchoring the majority of Kurds on its side at home. The last year has shown that there is no way for Turkey to achieve critical changes either by soft or hard power in Syria.

A ceasefire is not vital but it would help build a lot of trust all around if the PKK stopped or reduced its attacks.

The Government should engage the Kurdish movement. Allow lawyers to see Ocalan. But negotiations with the PKK are not necessary. Disarmament and demobilisation can come later. Right now, Turkey needs to get its basic framework in order.