An historic moment for the Peace Process

By Shivan Fazil Kurdi:

Yesterday, Abdullah Ocalan made an historic call for a truce with Turkey and for a new era of politics between the Kurds and Turks. My take on the peace process in Turkey is that peace-making by its nature is not easy at all. The peace process cannot be achieved between politicians around a table. Instead Turkey has to prepare the grounds for a peace process among the country’s communities and ethnicities. The long denial of the Kurds’ existence and basic rights requires that the Turkish government and citizens wholeheartedly reconcile with the Kurds.

For the peace process to be successful, Turkey needs a democratic constitution that treats all the ethnicities equally and fairly. The amended constitution should accommodate the rights of the second-biggest ethnicity in Turkey and the fourth-biggest – although without a state – in the Middle East. Turkey has to make further amendments to its constitution as vital steps to enable the peace process to be fruitful among its communities.

Previous amendments by the AKP (Justice and Development Party) have proved beneficial until now but they are not enough. Further constitutional amendments are vital and could they include articles similar to the following:

First, amend the definition of citizenship to include other ethnicities such as Kurds, Arabs, Armenians and the others.

Second, the constitution should contain articles for the resolution of the Kurdish case. For instance, by providing security and guarantees for today’s Kurdish political activists and guerrillas.

Third, all ethnicities should be able to study in their mother tongue and the state has to facilitate this basic human right. Given that education and identity is the basis of state-building, I think it is extremely important for Turkey to provide education in Kurdish, because Kurds are native to the land and not immigrants.

Shivan Fazil Kurdi: MSc. Advanced Computer Networks, University of Derby, UK and BSc. Information Technology, University of Kurdistan-Hawler, Kurdistan. He is the author of ‘Cloud Computing Security’, recently published and now available via Amazon.

Twitter:@ShivanFazil ; Facebook: ShivanFazilSabr