Adile Hanım: Your Debt to the Kurdish People Is the Truth

Rastinews — The process underway in Turkey under the banner of a "Terror-Free Turkey" is not just Ankara's affair. It is on the agenda of Kurds across the world too. What is being discussed is not the future of a handful of political parties, a few names or a few organization leaders. It is the future of a people who have paid a heavy price for decades.

That is exactly why the first question must be asked:

How much do Kurds actually know about their own future?

The greatest guarantee of any peace process is not secrecy but transparency. When the issue at hand is ending a conflict that has lasted more than forty years, decisions made behind closed doors and announced to the public afterward do not strengthen peace. They breed distrust instead.

Because behind this story are not numbers, but people.

Mothers who lost children. Fathers who went years without word from a son or daughter. People forced from their villages, politicians who passed through prisons, families who spent their lives in exile. Hundreds of thousands who devoted their lives, and staked their futures, on the Kurdish political struggle.

Telling this society "The process has begun, support it" is not enough.

The truth must be told first.

Can the memory of Rojava be erased so easily?

And none of this is ancient history.

Rojava is still fresh in memory.

When ISIS attacked, thousands of young Kurds went to the front. Thousands were killed, thousands wounded. For years, Kurdish politics described Rojava as an achievement — even a "red line."

Today, an entirely different political equation is taking shape in Syria.

No war, of course, should last forever. Yesterday's combatants can sit at the same table tomorrow. Many peace processes around the world are full of such examples. Isn't that, after all, what peace means — that enemies do not remain enemies forever?

But peace is not the erasure of memory.

A new chapter cannot be opened today by ignoring what happened yesterday. A society cannot be expected to forget overnight every political stance for which it lost its children.

If a new Syria is to be built, what will the status of Kurds be?

What place will Kurdish have?

What will become of the displaced?

What will remain of the political and social gains for which tens of thousands paid a price?

The answers are not contained in the sentence "Peace is coming."

When peace becomes beyond criticism, something is wrong

This is one of the things that troubles me most about the process underway in Turkey.

Nearly every objection to the process is met with the same line: "They don't want peace."

This is an extremely dangerous form of politics.

Supporting peace is one thing. Questioning the method being used is another.

A person can want peace and still say the process lacks transparency. They can want the guns to fall silent and still ask what Kurds will gain. They can accept Öcalan's role and still ask why the talks are being kept from the public.

None of this amounts to wanting war.

On the contrary, these are the questions anyone who wants a lasting peace should be asking.

Trying to silence dissenting Kurdish voices with lines like "They want war" or "The mountains are waiting for you" is not democratic politics.

Kurdish society does not have to speak with one voice.

Nor should it.

What was discussed on İmralı?

For months, the public has been given only limited information about the talks between İmralı, Kandil and the state.

Then leaked notes from the meetings set off an entirely different debate.

If these talks did in fact take place, the matter is now far bigger than who has or hasn't traveled to İmralı.

What was discussed?

What was demanded?

What was agreed to?

Which questions concerning the Kurds' future were put on the table?

What did the state commit to?

What demands did the Kurdish side drop?

Asking these questions is the right of journalists, politicians and ordinary Kurdish citizens alike.

Because the price of what was discussed at that table was not paid only by those who sat at it.

And now the coffins are arriving

At this especially critical moment, the sending of the remains of people said to have died years ago to Kurdish cities is a delicate matter that deserves separate scrutiny.

Returning a body to its family is, of course, a basic human right.

The real question is different:

Why now?

Picture a mother.

She has had no word of her child for years.

She does not know he is dead, or has no reliable information on when or how he died.

Then one day there is a knock at her door.

Her child's remains have arrived.

A condolence gathering is held.

If, before that mother can even mourn her child, the condolence gathering turns into a venue for delivering political messages, that is a serious ethical problem.

The identities, names and remains of the dead must not be turned into a tool for building public acceptance of any political process.

Because a funeral is not propaganda material.

Mourning is not propaganda.

A mother's tears are never that.

If there is a connection between the timing of these returns and the political process underway, it must be openly explained. And if there is no such connection, it is still the responsibility of politics to dispel the serious doubts that have arisen in public.

What more can this people give you?

Something must also be said plainly to Kurdish politicians.

This society did not just give you its votes.

It gave far more.

It gave its children.

It gave its youth.

It shared its bread.

It saw the inside of prisons.

It went into exile.

Its villages were emptied, its homes destroyed, it endured poverty and discrimination.

For decades it waited, believing "one day this will have a political payoff."

Now your most basic debt to that people is the truth.

You cannot explain everything. Diplomacy sometimes requires confidentiality; negotiation has its own rules. But you cannot keep the fundamental political choices shaping a people's future hidden from that people forever.

And you can never turn the pain of those who paid the price into a communication tool for politics.

Make peace — but make it clean

I am not against peace.

On the contrary, that is exactly the point:

Peace must not be tainted.

Because real peace is not just the silencing of guns.

Peace is truth.

It is reckoning.

It is justice.

It is memory.

It is the courage to discuss why people died, why they were killed, why they took to the mountains, why they went to prison, why they were forced to leave their villages.

And most importantly, it is building the democratic and legal order that will ensure the same suffering never happens again.

So the message to Kurdish politicians is clear:

Be courageous.

Be as open with your own people as you are with the state.

Tell them what you discussed.

Tell them what you gained.

Tell them what you gave up.

Make peace.

But make it clean.

Because what Kurds need is not a new sacred narrative, but the truth.

Not new propaganda, but transparency.

And no more coffins.

After all this cost, the very least this people has a right to demand is this:

A dignified, lasting peace in which nothing is hidden from them — not even their dead used as political material.