Adile Hanım: The Kurds laid down their arms. What did the state give up?

Rastinews — Ten years ago, Tahir Elçi was a lawyer investigated, detained and marked as a target for saying on television that "the PKK is not a terrorist organization."

Soon after, he was killed in Diyarbakır, in front of the Four-Legged Minaret.

A decade has passed.

Today the state is talking with Abdullah Öcalan. At his call, the PKK is ending its armed struggle and dissolving itself, and parliament is passing a law to regulate the legal consequences of it all.

But here lies history's bitter irony:

The state terminology that cost Tahir Elçi his life hasn't changed.

The PKK is still a "terrorist organization."

And this time, Kurdish political representatives in parliament have had a hand in shaping the legal framework that has emerged.

So let's ask, right from the start:

In these ten years, did the state change — or did the political vocabulary that Kurdish politics accepted?

Reading the framework law's 12 articles raises an even bigger question.

After more than forty years of conflict, who gave up what?

The PKK gave up its weapons.

It gave up its strategy of armed struggle.

It ended its existence as an organization.

It agreed to let the law of the Republic of Turkey determine the future of its members.

The state, for its part, did not give up its unitary-state thesis.

It did not revise its concept of constitutional citizenship to recognize the collective existence of Kurds.

It gave Kurdish no new constitutional status.

It did not recognize education in the mother tongue.

It did not accept local autonomy.

It did not make lifting the trustee regime the legal counterpart of this dissolution.

It did not resolve Öcalan's status.

It did not set up a truth and justice mechanism to reckon with the past.

So let's ask the same question a different way:

Of the two sides leaving the table, which one essentially kept its original position?

There's a Kurdish issue — but no Kurds in the law

Perhaps the most striking thing about the 12-article text is not what it says, but what it leaves out.

We are talking about a conflict spanning more than forty years.

Behind us lies an enormous history stretching from Diyarbakır Prison to unsolved murders, from burned villages to enforced disappearances, from language bans to the state of emergency, from JİTEM to government-appointed trustees.

And in the law enacted after all that history, there is no substantive change to the legal status of Kurds as a collective political subject.

There is no "Kurd" — but there is "organization member."

There is no Kurdish — but there are weapons.

There is no mother-tongue education — but there is sentence enforcement.

There is no truth commission — but there are findings by the security agencies.

There is no reckoning with the state's own past — but there is a detailed account of which legal category a PKK member's past falls into.

This is not simply a matter of word choice.

It shows how the issue is being defined.

Because however you name a problem, that is how you build its solution.

If what you see before you is a Kurdish issue, you talk about language, identity, equal citizenship, local democracy, political representation and reckoning with the past.

If what you see is a terrorism issue, you talk about disarmament, dissolution, surrender, punishment, supervision and reintegration.

The center of gravity of the 12-article text is the latter.

And that is exactly where the problem begins.

The state as both party and judge

One of the law's most important legal and political features is that whether the process has actually taken place is left to the determination of the state's own security apparatus.

Consider:

The PKK lays down its arms.

The state decides whether the arms were truly laid down.

The state determines whether the organization's actual existence has ended.

The state sets the legal mechanism in motion once that determination is made.

And it is again the state that decides who benefits from the arrangement.

This differs from a peace framework built, in the classical sense, between two political parties.

Here the state positions itself not as one party to the conflict, but as the sovereign standing above it.

In other words: both party and judge.

Both an actor in the past conflict and the authority deciding who will be deemed legally "clean" in the future.

This is precisely where the anticolonial objection begins.

Because relationships built on colonial or center-periphery domination are not established through military force alone.

The authority to decide who is guilty and who is legitimate is itself part of sovereignty.

Taking away the weapons is not enough; who gets to tell the story is also decided.

Which article covers the state's violence?

There's another question.

The PKK's violence is a matter for the law.

What about the state's violence?

Which article covers Roboski?

Which article covers the villages emptied in the 1990s?

The unsolved murders?

JİTEM?

The forcibly disappeared?

Torture in custody?

The damage that bans on Kurdish inflicted across generations?

The trustees appointed in place of elected mayors?

None of these sit at the center of the legal architecture built to end the armed conflict.

This is where the asymmetry becomes plain:

The PKK's past is handed over to criminal law; the state's past is left to history.

One side hands over its weapons while carrying the legal reckoning of its own past along with them.

The other side continues acting as arbiter of the future without putting its own past on the table.

This is not what reckoning looks like.

Because genuine transitional justice does not open only the file of the defeated or disarmed party.

It also opens the state's archives.

It opens the graves.

It opens the unsolved murders.

It investigates the disappeared.

It listens to the victims.

It holds perpetrators accountable regardless of the uniform they wore.

Who exactly is being "reintegrated into society"?

The law's language also deserves scrutiny.

Terms like "reintegrating" those who lay down arms into society, "social integration" and "integration" sound entirely positive at first glance.

But anticolonial thought is precisely what questions the power hiding behind such words:

Who is integrating into whom?

Are Kurds being integrated into the Republic?

Or is the Republic reconstituting itself to accept Kurds as an equal founding subject?

These two things are not the same.

In the first, the center stays fixed and the periphery adapts to it.

In the second, both sides change.

In today's picture, the PKK is changing.

The armed Kurdish movement is changing.

Its method of struggle is changing.

Its organizational structure is disappearing.

So which fundamental institution of the state's relationship with the Kurds is changing to the same degree?

Öcalan has authority, but no legal status

Perhaps the process's strangest paradox is Abdullah Öcalan himself.

The state, in practice, accepts Öcalan's political authority over the PKK.

Because when Öcalan speaks, the organization answers.

Öcalan issues a call, and a congress convenes.

Öcalan calls for the end of the armed struggle, and a historic transformation follows.

In other words, the state is making use of Öcalan's political influence.

But when it comes to that same Öcalan's legal status, there is no such clarity.

This can be put in a single sentence:

Öcalan's political authority is recognized; its legal counterpart is not.

Could there be an equation more convenient for the state than this?

Make use of his influence over the organization, but defer the debate over political status that it raises.

Demirtaş tells us something else

This is exactly why the Selahattin Demirtaş case is not simply a debate about his release.

Because if a state can craft special legal arrangements for fighters in the mountains to lay down their arms and return to society, it must also guarantee the legal rights of Kurds engaged in democratic politics.

Otherwise, a strange paradox emerges:

There is a legal framework for coming down from the mountain.

But the guarantee of democratic politics is still up for debate.

For forty years, Kurdish youth have been told: "Fight through politics, not weapons."

But if the right of those who choose politics to be elected, to remain in office, to speak and to organize is not secured as part of this same historic transformation, how can that call carry any legal credibility?

The ballot box needs the same guarantees as laying down arms.

As a people laid down its arms, what happened to its language?

And now to perhaps the simplest issue of all.

Kurdish.

In this country, people were investigated for years for singing in their own language, giving their children Kurdish names, or broadcasting in Kurdish.

If a people's language has been at the center of the issue for a century, what could be more natural than looking for that language's future within the peace framework?

I ask:

What has changed in Kurdish's constitutional status?

What right has been won regarding education in the mother tongue?

What binding guarantee has been introduced for the use of Kurdish in public services?

As a people gave up armed struggle, what did it gain for the legal standing of its own language?

If there is no answer to that question, disarmament should not be confused with a democratic solution.

Disarmament can prevent further deaths.

That alone carries historical weight.

But a democratic solution is something else.

A democratic solution means changing the inequality that produces conflict.

The real missing clause is the thirteenth

Perhaps the most important article of the 12-article law is the one that was not written.

Article 13: the status of the Kurds.

Because once the guns fall silent, that question will remain.

Are Kurds in the Republic of Turkey simply millions of citizens with individual rights?

Or are they a people with a language, a culture, a historical presence and collective democratic rights?

Will the Republic integrate the Kurds into itself?

Or will it democratize itself by recognizing the Kurds' existence?

Is the relationship between ruler and ruled changing?

This is precisely what the democratization of peace means.

So what has the state given up?

Let's return to the question we started with.

The PKK gave up its weapons.

It gave up its strategy of armed struggle.

It gave up its organizational existence.

It brought the future of its cadres under state law.

So what has the state given up?

The lack of status for Kurdish?

No.

Its centralized conception of the state?

No.

Its policy of appointing trustees?

There is still no legal guarantee against this.

Its refusal to recognize the collective identity of the Kurds?

No.

The impunity for past state crimes?

There is no comprehensive mechanism for reckoning with this.

The current execution regime imposed on Öcalan?

There is no clear legal counterpart to this.

Then why should it be called "opposition to peace" to ask, at the end of forty years of conflict, which side actually changed its paradigm?

Quite the opposite.

Real peace is precisely the courage to ask this question.

Because supporting the silencing of guns so that no one else dies is not the same as abandoning the Kurds' demand for equality.

The silence of the guns has value.

Every day mothers do not bury their children is a gain.

But the end of death is not the same as the realization of justice.

This may be the real question Tahir Elçi left behind.

Ten years ago, a lawyer who stepped outside the state's terminology on the PKK was heavily targeted.

Ten years later, the state is negotiating with Öcalan, managing the PKK's dissolution process, and passing legislation for it.

What the state deemed a crime yesterday, it can turn into state policy today.

So why must a Kurd still speak within the legal boundaries drawn by the state when talking about their own rights?

This is why I read the 12 articles and looked for a thirteenth.

Because the issue is not only how the PKK will lay down its weapons.

The issue is how Kurds will live after the PKK lays down its weapons.

And more importantly:

After the Kurdish movement that laid down its weapons, which weapon of its own hundred-year Kurdish policy will the state lay down?