Turkey is stepping into a new era, both politically and socially. We find ourselves concluding a thirty year period of armed conflict and entering a solution process to end the spilling of blood.

Despite the balance sheet of the bloody conflict between Turkish soldiers and Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants, there is an important factor facilitating this process. It is the sense of belonging which the people living in Turkey feel toward each other. This sense of belonging transcends the homogenization of the nation-state which caused the Kurdish issue, and is a real belonging. The co-existential belonging between Turks and Kurds, both historically and in terms of civilizational consciousness, is part of their awareness of belonging to a shared Islamic civilization.

If not for this collective consciousness, the bloody struggle that lasted for thirty years would already have broken out into a civil war. Because it has denied the awareness of the common civilization which brings together the inhabitants of this country, the official ideology has damaged the social tissue, and the cost has been severe. Despite this, the conflict has been limited to that between the armed forces, and the common denominator of Islam has prevented the outbreak of a civil war in this land.

However many volatile areas this new term referred to as the peace process may have, there are major reasons which require us to have hope. The first of these being that the statement defining the process reveals that the pursued peace is not one between Kurds and Turks. Because there was no strife between Turks and Kurds. The battles which did exist were between the organizational supporters of the armed conflict waged in the name of the two ethnicities.

Despite all these bloody conflicts, the people have not lost their common sense, and by maintaining their historical tranquility and acting more soundly than the state, intellectuals and organizations, have prevented the potential proliferation of a bloodbath. If this conflict had occurred in any European country where modern nationalism is very powerful, civil war would have broken out long ago.

During this process, responsibility falls on all intellectuals and media, and everyone with a conscience and sense of justice, in order to prevent any deaths and the spilling of blood which may result from cases of ignorance. As World Bulletin, we are closely monitoring any development that can stop the spilling of blood. At the same time we care about all efforts to end the conflicts which are the products of homogenizing modern projects. In the name of peace, we will likewise protect our consciousness against the ideological straitjackets whose coercion onto the children of the same civilization is being sought.

Ýlgili YazýlarEnglish