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.

The origin of the AKP’s relatively liberal and dovish stance on the Kurdish question goes back to the 1990s, when the party’s predecessor, the Welfare Party, departed from the traditional nationalism of the Turkish right. The party’s Islamist intellectuals argued that the Kurds were unhappy with the Republic of Turkey exactly for the same reason as the religious conservatives: They were oppressed, humiliated and marginalized, and their reactions were only handled with brute force.

When he became prime minister in 2005, Recep Tayyip Erdogan voiced this line. In 2005, in an important public speech in Diyarbakir, he used the term “Kurdish question,” which was then a taboo for Turkish politicians. He promised to win Kurdish votes, as his party initiated a series of significant reforms. In 2003, Kurdish “language courses” had become legal. Then, the state TV broadcaster TRT started a Kurdish-language TV channel in 2008, breaking another taboo. In 2012, Kurdish-language classes became optional in Turkish government schools.