This actually was a strange question. It was just any other question like who is going to fill the gap after the annihilation of the deep state. It sounds as if it were a condition that another armed organization must fill the place of a disarmed terror organization. It was quite interesting that these types of questions were asked and responded to as expected by commentators and policy makers, in a way that they actually believed in their normality.
After some time passed, the reason why these questions were posed could not be figured out, but the questions found their answers. Just like the place of the deep state attempted to be filled by the “parallel structure”, some actors who were eligible to fill the place of the PKK took to the stage.
With the Gezi uprising, the first candidate was presented to the liking of the decision-makers: DHKP-C. In fact, in Gezi an array of topics was assembled, which objectified the clash. There was only a mainstream hub of air in the center: “secularism and religion”. When one form of this clash which was “Alevite and Sunnism” or the sectarian clash once surfaced, a DHKP-C with its salient sectarian face replaced the young people on the street who were playing piano or reading a book or wearing converse shoes. However, as expected, the organization couldn’t further the clash to a higher level.
During December, the show that the parallel structure made was inherently another shift of a paradigm, which was a religion, secularism and sect-oriented one. When “the Islam versus Islam” attempted to raise the level of bipolarization, the “community” alternative was trying to replace the position of the deep state relying on ethnicity.
Today, when we look at our Syria and Iraq borders from this perspective, we can mention the strong candidacy of an alternative terror organization, which could fill the place of PKK. Since the beginning of the resolution process, given the name the “Islamic state of Iraq and Damascus”, which is internationally known as the Iraqi Al Qaida, it went beyond Iraq and became a threat for the region. If we just realize the synchronizing time effect, we may observe that a religion-based terror organization is trying to sit in the place of an ethnic-based terror organization.
The nationalist and nation state devices, which have been striving to survive for the last two centuries, are changing their versions with religious and sectarian-based ones. A new paradigm is taking place.
When we take into account its historical development, nationalism was laid at the foundation of a populist and liberal freedom movement, which opposed the pledge to kings and tyrants at its onset. In the foundation of the American and French revolution in the late 1700s, there were sentiments of patriotism and nationalism. After a century, which entailed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, it turned into a nationalist ideology, which relied on ethnic independence such as nationalism, Pan-Slavism, Pan-Arabism. The notion of nationalism became radicalized in parallel with the colonialism during WW2. Thus, it changed its form once again and the ultra-nationalist ideologies such as fascism, Nazism, played the main role of the ruin, which lasted for many years. Europe was able to confront its nationalistic shames only with the end of the cold war. Just like the resolution process between PKK and Turkey, the IRA and English peace negotiations and Eta-Spain quest for a solution were other similar examples.
However, with the beginning of collapse of nationalism, a synchronizing rise of another value facilitates the understanding of today. People who watched the persecution in Chechnya, Bosnia and Palestine found the base for resistance as diverse ethnic groups under one common religion, the ummah in Islam, in particular. Surveys proved that two thirds of the world’s Muslims were expecting that the Islamic countries could gather under the ummah roof, that is the kilhafah or the Islamic state. The Arab Spring was an outcome of a result of resilience against the colonial leftovers who battered the Middle East with nationalism.
The secular impact to the Arab spring foreshadowed the sectarian clash, which would break the common religious sense and ummah perception. The revolts such as the movement of nationalism, which began with the quest of freedom, turned into religious discrimination and blood feuds. After that, the common dream of Muslims , “khilafa”, or the “Islamic state”, was equalized to barbarism and terror.
With the unbelievably rapid growth of the mass communication tools, the change, which lasted for decades, today only last for weeks. All the religion and sectarian-based wars in the world – the curtains of enmity – are pulled, faces are spit upon and the religious discrimination and hate go on the way. The human kind, who can remember what the wave of nationalism caused yesterday, has concerns regarding what the future of the world is going through.
In short, the change, which interests Turkey closely and in which one certain partner feels closer to others, is part of the paradigm shift in the world. For all this, okay but one cannot help asking one more question.
When the winds of democracy and peace are blowing, the nervous modern people are asking, “What will refill the empty places after the PKK and deep state?” Were they asking questions that belong to themselves or carrying rumors in the backstage of neo-colonialism? This is what I deeply wonder.
