Unprecedented Turns On Turkey's Kurdish Question
The Imrali Process is providing unexpected hope for a resolution to the Kurdish question in Turkey, writes Cengiz Çandar.
Turkey is a dazzling country. For years, I have been saying that nobody can claim to be an “expert on Turkey." Developments in the last couple of months have proven how right I was.
Actually anyone can reach the same conclusion by looking at two photographs I saw.
A photograph printed on the first pages of Turkish dailies in July caused a furor. Two women members of the parliament from the Peace and Democracy Party [BDP] known to be following the line of the notorious PKK and accepted as a Kurdish party in the parliament that is perceived as "Turkey’s Sinn Fein” were in the photograph. One of them is the current co-chair of BDP and the other was the previous co-chair. They were photographed embracing armed PKK militants who had cut off a road and were checking identifications at a point near the Iraqi border.
Many people believed that the BDP people who had taken several journalists and TV cameramen with them had made a deal with the PKK and the photographs were scripted. In the hot summer days of 2012, meanwhile, the war between the Turkish state and Kurdish insurgents of the PKK were raging in full on the mountainous region near the Iraqi border. The PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, who is serving in life sentence on Imrali Island near Istanbul, was in full isolation. Nobody had heard from him for more than a year.
