Since the Islamic State (IS) began attacking the Kurdish-dominated Syrian town of Kobani on the Turkish border about a month ago, Turkey’s Kurds have been blaming the Turkish government for disregarding their Syrian relatives’ suffering and strongly indicated that the peace process with Turkey is on a knife's edge. Selahattin Demirtas, co-chair of People’s Democracy Party (HDP), on Oct. 6 blamed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for his remarks equating the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) with the IS. “If we want this process to produce a lasting peace, we should not abandon Kobani,” Demirtas said. “We do not want the Kobani resistance to deepen the rupture between the Turks and the Kurds. We want to have a permanent resolution. This requires some necessities to be fulfilled.”

Erdogan shot back Oct. 12, saying, “We don’t have any business with those taking orders from a terror organization.” The link between the PKK and the HDP is unquestionable, and Erdogan held Demirtas responsible for the death of 40 Turkish citizens after Demirtas’ called people to the streets to protest against the government regarding Kobani. Yet Demirtas also read a letter written by imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan calling on all Kurdish protesters to be calm and urging the sides to intensify the peace talks. This letter would not have been delivered to the public had it not been approved by the government. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu followed Oct. 17, stressing that Ocalan is neither granted “official negotiator” status nor is he considered the sole representative of the Kurds. On Oct. 19, Davutoglu held a 11-hour marathon with the Wise People council designated by the government.

“What the prime minister is arguing is that it was not Ocalan’s letter that brought the situation under control on the streets,” Avni Ozgurel, a member of the council and a long time commentator on political affairs, told Al-Monitor. “Davutoglu argues that cease-fire morale boomeranged on the HDP and the PKK and that the people did not give them the support they expected. Therefore, the prime minister believes it was not Ocalan’s letter, but the people, who ended these violent protests on the streets.”

Dogu Ergil, another member of the council and a professor at Ankara University with expertise on the Kurdish issue, has a different take. “Claiming that Ocalan was not given a central role in these talks does not sincerely reflect the choices this government has made so far in approaching this issue,” Ergil told Al-Monitor. “The government indeed assigned Ocalan as its political interlocutor. And that, in the first place, revealed that the government looks at the Kurdish issue only as a means of dealing with a security dilemma, a dilemma that needs to be addressed as a means of finding new ways of defeating terrorism. This very evaluation caused the government to decide to have Ocalan as its political interlocutor. But if it had approached the Kurdish issue as a social-conflict problem, and admitted in the first place that the resolution can only be accomplished by people’s acceptance and blessings of the end result, then it would have been the people who took center stage in these peace talks.”