Bahçeli Urges Speed on Framework Law: 'We Have No Time to Lose'
RastinewsNationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli said that with parliament's passage of the framework law, attention has now turned to the implementation stage, and called for legal and administrative steps to be taken without delay.
Bahçeli stressed that state institutions must formally determine and confirm that the PKK's weapons and organizational capacity have been brought to an end:
"We have no time to lose."
Bahçeli described the process as a "multilayered national security issue" and said the current stage was not an end point but "the beginning of a new phase."
Bahçeli's full statement follows:
"The Law on Strengthening National Solidarity and Social Unity, adopted by our Grand National Assembly through the national will, is the legal sphere's fitting and effective result of several things at once: Turkey's accumulated experience in fighting terrorism; years of hardship that tested our nation's patience to its limits; the heavy price paid in the blood and lives of our brave sons; an effective, deterrent, respected, indigenous and national defense industry built up through national technology moves; and, finally, the necessity of uprooting terrorism together with the political, sociological and armed circles that have fed it from beyond our borders as well as from within the country.
Ridding Turkey of terrorism entirely is not a security matter limited to neutralizing armed elements in the mountains and weakening their organizational capacity. It is a multilayered national security issue that requires draining the political, sociological and geopolitical ground in which terrorism could take root again; cutting off the veins of conflict and hostility that outside actors seek to open between our people along ethnic or sectarian lines; and establishing our state's sovereign authority, unchallenged, across the entire country, without leaving it open to interference from any illegitimate center, proxy element or external interest.
The intellectual, political and strategic source of the Terror-Free Turkey initiative, which we first put forward at our Nationalist Movement Party group meeting on October 22, 2024, must be sought in exactly this truth.
Time has proven us right. At a time when terrorist organizations and proxy forces in the region surrounding Turkey are being used as instruments in struggles for geopolitical influence, and ethnic and sectarian differences are being turned into levers for regional calculations, resolving the terrorism issue once and for all through Turkey's own national will has become an unpostponable matter of national survival.
The spiral of conflict that began with Israeli and American attacks on Iran, and expanded through Iran's retaliation targeting third countries and military sites in the region, has shown how quickly a regional dispute can cross borders and turn into a chain of interlocking crises.
That conflict has come to threaten global stability as well as the region's future, across a wide field ranging from energy supply to global trade.
Israel's policy of aggression and conflict — a terror network in its own right, whose bloodshed in Gaza has not yet stopped and which it has extended to Lebanon and Iran — and Iran's retaliation targeting third countries, its moves disrupting shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, and its threats spreading into the Gulf, have together made clear that the fire raging in our region carries a dangerous potential to draw in new states, open new fronts and create new battlegrounds.
Under these circumstances, closing every breach that terrorism has opened on Turkey's own home front has become a vital matter.
In this light, the Terror-Free Turkey goal is built on the aim of taking back — permanently, never to return — one of the bloodiest instruments of geopolitical intervention used against Turkey for nearly half a century, from the hands of those who foolishly wield it.
This process — which began with our call of October 22, 2024, took concrete shape through stages moving toward the PKK terrorist organization's dissolution and disarmament, and gained a new character when the matter was brought under the control of the national will through parliament — has been shaped by an accurate reading of the regional conditions Turkey faces, forming a whole in which each stage completes the one before it.
A comprehensive will has finally taken shape, bringing together, on the same strategic path, our state's unbending resolve and social unity on one hand, and the Terror-Free Turkey goal with the "Terror-Free Region" ideal on the other.
Now that the Terror-Free Turkey goal has acquired a legal basis through the will of our Grand National Assembly, the guiding star of its next phase will be this: to remove the scourge of terrorism — which has cost the Republic of Turkey such a heavy price — entirely from our state and society without leaving it as a burden on the shoulders of future generations, and to allow no possibility whatsoever for terrorism to reproduce, under different guises and through different means, the goals it could not reach by force of arms.
It is not possible for the Republic of Turkey's unitary structure, its system of government built on national sovereignty, the indivisible unity of the homeland and nation, or the Turkish nation's shared vision of its history and future, to become subjects of any negotiation.
The fact that the adopted law contains legal mechanisms to be activated only after authorized state institutions determine and confirm that the terrorist organization and structures linked to it have ended their actual existence, that the weapons and ammunition under their control have been handed over, and that their command and control capacity has been eliminated, makes the purpose of the legislation entirely clear.
There is no need for distortion, wavering, empty rhetoric dressed up in patriotic slogans, or political acrobatics. This law must be read not from a supposedly oppositional standpoint wrapped entirely in prejudice, but from the standpoint of the Turkish nation and the Republic of Turkey — taking into account, together with its text and rationale, the important results it will produce in the nation's favor.
On this point, not the slightest doubt should be allowed to take root in anyone's mind regarding the memory of our dear martyrs or the sacrifice of our heroic veterans.
If Turkey has today reached the strength to consign terrorism to history, the foundation of that lies in the sacred blood of our dear martyrs, who defended every inch of the homeland's soil with their lives; the epic sacrifice of our veterans, who live on bearing blast scars and shrapnel in their bodies; the years-long struggle of our Turkish Armed Forces, with their three-thousand-year glorious history, along with our police force, our gendarmerie, our village guards and all our security forces; and the resolve shown by our nation.
The complete elimination of terrorism will be the clearest proof that the struggle of the heroes who made this land our homeland was not in vain, and that the PKK terrorist organization and all its extensions have been buried in history's darkest pages.
It should also not be forgotten that the stage reached with the adoption of this law is not an end point, but rather the beginning of a new phase in which even greater vigilance is needed, particularly on the legal and administrative fronts.
We have no time to lose.
The legal and administrative processes envisaged to follow the law's entry into force must be implemented as quickly as possible. No gap in authority or coordination between institutions should be allowed to emerge, and the historic opportunity that has arisen must under no circumstances be allowed to become an area exploited by various anti-national fronts, discourses or rhetoric.
Turkey's direction is clear.
The Terror-Free Turkey goal is one of the founding conditions for Turkey's next great advance.
Bringing investment, production, industry, agriculture, tourism, education and employment opportunities to regions that, for years, could not fully mobilize their economic, social and human potential under the climate of fear created by terrorism; removing the artificial distance that has been built up between the state and citizens; and further strengthening Turkish citizenship on the basis of a shared history, destiny and ideal of living together — these will be the concrete results of terrorism's permanent elimination.
The prayer of our late poet Ziya Gökalp — "I ask only two things of God: may my homeland be happy, may my home be blessed" — is also the simplest and most sincere summary of the Terror-Free Turkey ideal.
I hope that this historic stage we have reached brings auspicious results for our dear nation, for the Republic of Turkey, and for the peace, stability and well-being of our region. I remember with mercy and gratitude our dear martyrs who sacrificed their lives for the unity of our homeland and the survival of our state, and I extend my respect and gratitude to our heroic veterans."