Failure of Ocalan letter shows new direction for Turkey’s Kurds / Gokhan Bacik

Essentially dismissed by the HDP, Ocalan’s letter and how key political figures like President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reacted to it still created a major political stir with great symbolic meaning.

To begin with, AA’s announcement of Ocalan’s letter was not an ordinary journalistic affair. Behind the announcement was the state’s decision to have Ocalan involved in an ongoing election campaign.

By informing the public via its official news agency, the state expected people would be duly informed on Ocalan’s opinions, leaving no discussion of authenticity.

Of course, shortly after the letter’s release, sources close to the government interpreted it to mean that Ocalan was advising Kurds not to vote for Ekrem Imamoglu, the main opposition candidate, but instead remain neutral, basically asking them to boycott.

Erdogan publicly referred to Ocalan’s letter in his remarks on the day before the vote -- a highly unusual moment in which a sitting president used the words of an enemy of the state, long known as the “baby killer,” to influence voters. According to Erdogan, Ocalan clearly wanted Kurds not to support Imamoglu.

Erdogan said the letter pointed to a leadership competition between Ocalan and Selahattin Demirtas, the jailed former HDP leader, and that Ocalan’s message was meant to remind the HDP to stick to its own political orientation rather than support any other party.

The rise of Ocalan as a legitimate political actor able to influence Kurdish voters could be interpreted as a critical development in which the Turkish state has de facto recognized him as the leader of the country’s Kurds.

Yet Turkish officials, including Erdogan, publicly asked Kurds to follow Ocalan, not Demirtas, which suggests the state sees Demirtas as more of a threat than the jailed leader of the PKK, which has led an armed insurgency in Turkey’s southeast since 1984 and is labelled a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the EU.

With Demirtas, Kurdish politics has received considerable positive attention from other sectors of Turkish society. Under Demirtas’s leadership, the Kurdish political project has succeeded in becoming a nationwide organization at the expense of Erdogan.

But, what was Ocalan’s intention in the letter? Did he really want Kurds to stay neutral, which would favor Erdogan’s ruling party? Or perhaps the government’s interpretation of Ocalan’s letter was incorrect.

Given the ambiguous language of the letter, which is part of Ocalan’s personal style, it is not easy to comment on its message. Thus, it is first up to the Kurdish political leaders to inform the public on the main intention behind the letter.

So far, Kurdish leaders have commented very ambiguously on the letter, providing little detail about the gist of the message. One gets the impression that Kurdish leaders want to strategically maintain a certain ambiguity when it comes to Ocalan’s letter.

In the meantime, the letter incident has demonstrated that there is a growing new dynamic in Turkish politics on the Kurdish issue. Many Turks are ready to embrace Kurdish politics as represented by new leaders like Demirtas, whereas they remain vehemently against any process with Ocalan. The Turkish public has given a strong positive signal to Demirtas while holding onto its very negative perception of Ocalan.

This new dynamic has within it a shift that it is difficult, even impossible for many Kurds to contemplate: that a new leader like Demirtas could challenge Ocalan and the PKK.

Ahval

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