MESOP HEADLINE TODAY : How does PKK help Erdoğan? BY Orhan Cemal Cengiz (Zaman)

Any authoritarian regime would be pleased to have an armed organization like the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) on its soil. Because with its barbaric acts, it provides an extremely useful pretext to step away from democracy, to exert pressure on social opposition and so on.

Look at what the PKK did in just a week in Turkey. In the Ceylanpınar district of Şanlıurfa province they killed two police officers, Feyyaz Yumuşak and Okan Acar, in their sleep. A PKK militant, while others stood watch, broke into their house and killed these young police officers aged 24-25, firing at their necks with a gun which had a silencer. This monstrous act was defended with the claim that it was retaliation for the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) bombing that massacred 31 youngsters in Suruç, also in Şanlıurfa province. It is hard to believe such nonsensical “reasoning” can be put forward to defend a barbaric act like this. To retaliate for the killings of youngsters, they killed two other young people.

Then, the other day, they killed Arslan Kulaksız, the gendarmerie commander of the Malazgirt district of the southeastern province of Muş. Apparently a PKK team was following the commander closely and then they attacked the car. The commander was traveling with his daughter and his wife. The daughter was wounded and Kulaksız lost his life in this attack. Killing someone in front of his daughter and his wife is a devilish kind of act that I cannot find the correct words to describe. The PKK has killed other people in front of their families, too.

The list of killings continues like that. In Diyarbakır, traffic police officers were killed after they were lured to a spot with a false notification of a traffic accident. And there are other murders.

Why do the PKK carry out such barbaric acts? Right now, we have 80 deputies in Parliament who were elected from the lists of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). Why is the PKK resorting to violence In spite of this very strong political representation? The organization was gaining legitimacy in the eyes of the world after its struggle against ISIL in Iraq and Syria; why do they risk all political gains with these barbaric and nonsensical violent acts?

If you ask them, I am sure the PKK would say that the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government has not keep its promises; they are fighting against the AK Party’s Rojava (Kurdish region in Syria) policy, and so on.Whatever they say, in reality, they are doing all of these: They are putting the movement in tremendous jeopardy. The HDP doubled its votes in the June 7 election; it won a landslide victory. If, however, the PKK continues these actions, it will be impossible for the HDP to pass the national threshold in any election in the near future. The PKK is also helping President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to survive, opening the way to his return to preeminence after the harsh defeat of the June 7 election. As everyone knows, Erdoğan wants to hold an early election, hoping that this time around the AK Party will come to power on its own. Using the PKK’s attacks as a pretext, the AK Party government launched a movement for massive arrests across the country; they took draconian measures all over Turkey.

The PKK is giving the kiss of life to Erdoğan and they are reawakening his dreams of having ultimate power over the country. The HDP is losing its voters and the AK Party is gaining the sympathy of the nationalists by bombing Iraq and so on.

In an early election, it would not be a distant dream for Erdoğan to get the necessary votes to give him all the power he desires http://www.todayszaman.com/columnist/orhan-kemal-cengiz/how-does-pkk-help-erdogan_394867.html