Turkey’s PKK Militants End Cease-fire

Why did it become controversial?

Most Kurds are pious, socially conservative Sunni Muslims, so they usually voted for Erdogan’s Justice and Development (AK) Party – which consequently won three successive elections (2003, 2007, 2011) with increasing majorities.

Five months ago, Turkish voters repudiated the AKP, which had been in power since 2002, by denying it a majority in parliamentary elections. This is because Ankara is concerned with what is unfolding on its southern borders in Iraq and Syria, and is fully aware that the Iranian expansion in these countries would tip the balance against Turkey. Forced to choose between security and freedom, he said, “they chose security”. There was black propaganda being disseminated about the presidential system before the June 7 elections.

No doubt, the AKP’s stunning win has come as a disappointment to the Syrian regime and Iran, both of which were looking forward to the party failing to secure an outright majority to undermine the negotiating power of the Saudi-Qatar-Turkey bloc over the Syrian conflict, Al Rashid argued. It garnered enough support of the Turkish electorate to break the 10% threshold to enter parliament last June by getting approximately 13% of the vote.

New elections were announced since the AKP was unable to form a cabinet in 45 days with the HDP refusing to back the government formation. Erdogan himself has asked the worldwide community to accept the results and said that the “national will” of the country favours stability.

However, despite seemingly achieving a resounding mandate, the fact remains that the half of the country that did not vote for AKP utterly detests the sitting president and his party, and the political climate of Turkey is likely to remain polarised.

According to a Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency, more than 150 Turkish soldiers and police officers have been killed since July 7 in armed attacks blamed on the PKK, which has been fighting for an autonomous Kurdish region inside Turkey since the 1980s.

The May 18 attacks on the offices of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) – of which the MPs have mostly been elected in Turkey’s southern and southeastern regions, where the population is essentially Kurdish – and the June 5 attack on an HDP rally in Diyarbakır that killed four were also pinned on ISIS. The PKK used IEDs to blow up military convoys.

How could the violence and bombings have helped Erdogan and the AKP?

Flush with an election victory, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has demanded constitutional change that he wants to gain sweeping powers, and vowed to “liquidate” Kurdish guerrillas in a defiant speech that gave no quarter to those hoping for conciliation.

HDP Mersin deputy Dengir Mir Mehmet Fırat also told Today’s Zaman in Ankara on Wednesday that the 2 percent lost by the HDP went to the AK Party because of the government’s repressive policies in the country’s Southeast provinces. That relationship was destined to collapse – after all the Islamic State seeks a new caliphate in the Middle East and the government in Turkey is, by the Islamic State standards, an apostate. However, unlike the PKK, the HEP saw diplomacy as the best way to forward the rights of Turkey’s marginalized and repressed Kurds.

In a somewhat paradoxical and unorthodox way, Erdogan appears in the public mind to embody a distant, faded memory of the grandeur of the sultans and simultaneously of Kemal Ataturk as he defends the unity of Anatolia, which is now at risk because of the Kurdish question.