With the arrest of the co-mayors of Diyarbakir, Turkey’s pivotal Kurdish city, on Oct. 25, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) took another step in its latter-day strategy on the “Kurdish question”: to kill all terrorists and arrest all their political supporters. A strategy, in other words, that almost all Turkish governments have pursued, more or less, since the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 — leaving behind thousands of casualties, with no end in sight.
Yet there is a major irony in this AKP strategy, because it was none other than the AKP and the intelligentsia who told us, for years, that this “security-focused solution” to the Kurdish question was a dead end. It was also they who tried a fundamentally different approach: reforms for all Kurds and negotiations with the Kurdish militants. It is interesting how they ended up reverting back to the concepts of the “Old Turkey” that they had criticized for years.