Boundaries need to be challenged to resolve ethnic and cultural clashes…
This is actually a general rule…
The first move that openly challenged the boundaries of the sensibilities of our public was witnessed in Habur… Before everything went awry, PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) militants crossed the border freely, were received amid fanfare, and the limits of legal interpretation within the political and legal mechanism were kept as expansive as possible.
What followed during Nevruz with Abdullah Öcalan’s letter and its reading in a Diyarbakır square was not simply just the generation of hope. It was the crossing of thresholds. A breaking of taboos.
The prime minister and Masoud Barzani making an appearance in Diyarbakır could also be added to that same category.
Laws, too, apart from mindset, tradition and taboos, are a part of the sensitive boundaries that can be pushed.
When politics and its significance is taken into consideration, laws comprise the most vital and critical boundaries.
Political and social movements often adopt policies of testing legal boundaries in order to ensure that their demands and existence are accepted.
This represents “threshold politics” in one sense.
The system’s politics, those conducted within the boundaries of the law, and its keeping to the confines of legal boundaries at times, while exceeding them at others is a three-pronged style of politics that derives its legitimacy from society…
It is politics that indicates the tension that exists between legality and legitimacy…
This is significant because “historical progression” to an extent is based on such politics and such tension.
In the near past, various societal upheavals and democratic struggles, ranging from religious movements to leftist movements to ethnic movements to the women’s movement pushed legal boundaries, and through the strength they gained from new societal formations and societal legitimacy, came into existence and conducted politics on the fringes of legal boundaries.
It was this type of “threshold politics” that generally allowed such processes of change.
There are many instances of this in our society too.
This is how we went from a point when the headscarf in the state arena was literally considered as political suicide in the eyes of the law to the current situation where the headscarf is accepted as natural and is even prominent when representing the presidency or the country during official representations. This shows how the field of rights was widened through threshold politics.
Many legal changes regarding freedom of expression were also achieved in this manner.
This was how it came about that mentioning one’s thoughts about the 1915 incident and uttering the word genocide were no longer regarded as crimes…
By proceeding along the basis of the idea of pushing the boundaries of sensibilities in order to resolve ethnic and cultural clashes, it is possible and essential to view the progress made in recent years regarding the Kurdish problem and the current bottleneck it faces in the light of threshold politics.
Öcalan, who has been incarcerated since 1999, has for years now held on to the option of directing and impacting politics via the visits he is allowed.
This situation is not legal but is borderline i.e. its necessity and legitimacy has been accepted and ignoring it could lead to serious repercussions. Furthermore, it is a situation that creates expectations and this makes it an operational situation, or to be more precise, a political situation…
The same applies to the KCK (Kurdish Communities Union)…
It pushes legal boundaries, often violates them, but is organic and finds societal legitimacy. It signals the formation of a structure able to conduct politics within the framework of its capability to issue a demand based on its being a social creation.
The vital instruments of a state of threshold politics such as organic creations and its actors in the societal and political arena prevent the arena of violence from taking center stage in order to allow it to play a role in resolving the Kurdish problem.
The political leadership, system and state have been aware of this for a while now.
The state has known about the presence of Öcalan and the KCK for a long time, has observed without intervening, and even opened doors for them.
The road to a solution has to follow this path in any event.
The restructuring of the public sphere and democratic principles regarding public order is taking place by encompassing these structures as well.
This matter is just as important as the withdrawal of armed members and the laying down of arms.
It is a threshold matter.
