Dr Thomas James Phillips
Writing in the 19th century literary feuilleton Vremya (Time), the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky chastised the intelligentsia of his day for its revolutionary impatience.
Having been confined and neutered before the liberation of the serfs in the early 1860s, these ‘superfluous men’ were ready to stand to the fullness of their height and reinvigorate society in line with their designs and schemes. But Dostoevsky, who managed to combine burning criticism of modernity (especially of the European variety) with prophetic criticism of revolutionary utopianism, cautioned these men to ‘sacrifice all your titanism to the general good; take a five-inch step instead of a seven-league one; accept wholeheartedly that if you are to advance further, five inches is all the same worth more than nothing.’ Great transformations usually have humble beginnings and what if, he pondered somewhat mischievously, these superfluous men started on the ground-floor by teaching children to read?
Dostoevsky’s plea for revolutionary humility seems to apply mutatis mutandis to today’s stuttering attempts to chip away at the Kurdish Question in Turkey – a subject of no little importance to Cyprus, as has long been understood.
The revolutionary ambitions of Turkey’s senior Kurdish interlocutors are far-reaching: a substantive and communal form of democracy embracing economic production as well as politics; religious, ethnic, and cultural pluralism; the empowerment of women; and, ultimately, a global model of human coexistence that transcends nation-states. And yet, given their parlous circumstances after the foreseeable withdrawal of US support in Northern Syria, and in the midst of changing regional and global dynamics, the Kurds find themselves responding to the call of Devlet Bahçeli (of all people) to disarm and roll themselves tightly in the warm embrace of the Turkish Republic. It has all the appearance of a wolf inviting you to a lovely gourmet dinner.
By accepting this call, which also has wide parliamentary approval, senior figures in Turkey’s Kurdish movement are signalling their willingness to sacrifice some of their titanism for the sake of taking a five-inch step, all in the face of insuperable circumstances.
If by doing so they can secure meaningful political participation, cultural rights (including mother tongue education in the Kurdish language), an end to the swirling hurricane of violence, and some of the usual accoutrements of transitional justice, then every single one of those five inches will have been well-earned. More than that, shifting the so-called Kurdish Question onto a democratic and political track might provide an opening for even deeper changes to the Turkish state at some point in the future, maybe even taking the hard edges off its virulent and exclusionary nationalism.
But as the Kurds and their leaders know better than anyone else, the entire process is riddled with jeopardy. The timing, for one thing, is very convenient, as President Erdogan hopes to put Kurdish votes to good use ahead of an increasingly likely election in April 2028. It should go without saying that his success in that endeavour would coarsen and thicken the chain of autocracy he has spent decades wrapping around his country’s neck.
There is, in fact, precisely nothing in Turkish politics to suggest that democratic transformation is anywhere near the table, let alone on it. To the contrary, the techniques of state oppression first tested-out on the Kurds – removing elected mayors, weaponising the dependent judiciary, throwing political opponents in jail – have gone mainstream. As Erugrul Kurkcu put it in a recent article for the American magazine Jacobin, the Turkish state’s perspective on the peace process (or the ‘Terror Free Turkey Initiative’ as they prefer to call it) might be best understood as a selective nonaggression pact inside a wider context of deepening authoritarianism.
As the great Cypriot journalist and activist Theophilos Georgiades famously said, ‘the freedom of Cyprus passes through the mountains of Kurdistan’. I first heard this memorable aphorism a few years ago, before I moved to Cyprus, after chairing a session at the annual EU-Turkey Civic Commission in the European Parliament. It came from the mouth of a well-known Cypriot lawyer, and it struck me then as something that was obviously true for very obvious reasons: there is after all a joint struggle against the same aggressive regional hegemon that has under its command the second biggest army in Nato.
But while I hold firm to the view that the Kurds’ effort to shift out of the military gear and into a higher political one deserves support (I do not at all want to suggest that Cypriot solidarity with the Kurds should be transactional), I wonder whether Georgiades’ elegant summation will stand the test of time. Perhaps it will – perhaps, in time, the Kurdish five-inch step will give us a more moderate, malleable and peaceful Turkey. But then again, it could easily turn into a Faustian bargain that trades basic Kurdish freedoms for a steroidal boost to Turkey’s authoritarian leadership. Not, I’m sure, what Georgiades had in mind.
The other possible outcome, which one shudders to contemplate, is that Turkey will not summon the political will to capitalise on the Kurds’ peace overtures and will ditch the process entirely as soon as it is no longer convenient. It would not be the first time: it only takes a short memory to recollect the murderous aftermath of the last failed attempt in 2015.
Does the freedom of Cyprus pass through the mountains of Kurdistan? It is too early to say, but there is no alternative to hope.
Dr Thomas James Phillips is an assistant professor of law at the American University of Cyprus