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The adventure of the Kurdish rebellion, that started fifteen years ago with the Kurdistan Workers Party did not finish when the guerilla withdrawed from Turkish borders. In armed or barehanded, there are still 20 millions of Kurds in that country and many millions in Europa. How stopping the fights could really tolls the bell for a people ? It is not the first time that Abdullah Öcalan called to peace. These last years, the PKK did not propose less than three one-sided cease-fired and all of them had been refused by Turkey, for that state built a wall of intransigence and stays determined to "get rid of Kurds". But today, while the Kurdish part of the country has been destroyed by fifteen years of war and exactions, the Western part of Turkey collapsed, deadly wounded by the earthquake. And these two tragedies are not totally unconnected each other . As Veli Haydar Güleç, the Provincial Chairman of HADEP (legal pro-Kurdish party) in Istanbul recently said : "During the last fifteen years, the Turkish state was essentially preoccupied, in its policy as in its structural organization, to make war, at any price, and is not prepared to protect and to obtain the population’s trust face to a such catastrophe." And the massive international solidarity that had been showed then, proved to the Turks that their isolation does not result from foreign hostility, but from the inflexibility and the stiffness of their political system, that prevents every détente, any step for peace, any held hand. If the PKK wants to stop its fights and to begin a political action, it’s a chance for Turkey for it could not be able to instaure that truce, so much the war system strangles that country since fifteen years, and refuses that Kurdish and Turkish citizens express themselves. And many Turkish citizens are convinced that democracy in Turkey could not be make without a political resolution of the Kurdish question. The worst mistake that could make the Turkish politicians and army would be to cinider that withdrawal like the end of the Kurdish problem and the end of PKK, without taking advantage of that held hand for rebuilding that ruined country on new basis, and ethnical discrimination would stop to found its constitution. The peace in Turkey and Kurdistan could just be obtained by political agreement in a process of democratization and the recognition of Anatolian people ‘s cultural and political identity. September 1999 |