Can Turkish social democrats start again with the Kurds?

Thirty years ago, on Aug. 15, 1984, at around 21:30 p.m., militants of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) infiltrated from Iraq and raided the Turkish border towns of Eruh and Şemdinli.

Then-Prime Minister Turgut Özal dismissed the attacks as the work of “a handful of marauders,” but actually it was the beginning of one of modern history’s most ambitious guerilla warfare campaigns by the PKK, which had been secretly founded by Abdullah Öcalan in 1978, in a village in the Lice district of the predominantly Kurdish-populated southeastern province of Diyarbakır.

There’s no need to get into the details, but over 40,000 people of this country have been killed in the fight between the PKK and the Turkish security forces over the last 30 years.

Turkish security forces used to be on alert every Aug. 15 against possible PKK attacks “marking the day,” which have claimed a lot of lives in the past. However, this year there was no news of any attacks or casualties, just like the year before, thanks to the dialogue between the PKK and the government that started two years ago.

The dialogue was initiated by Prime Minister (and now president-elect) Tayyip Erdoğan in pursuit of a political solution to the Kurdish problem. Erdoğan has been carrying out the dialogue via Hakan Fidan, the head of Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MİT), with Öcalan, who has been held in İmralı Island prison since 1999, when he was captured in a MİT operation with U.S. intelligence agency the CIA.

There were no clashes on Aug. 15 this year, and on the contrary there were three interesting developments that seem to be heralding more echoes in politics in the coming days...