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Turkey needs to deal with Kurdish issue on individual level: Ex-Iraqi president adviser
1/13/2015
Hiwa Osman, an award-winning Iraqi Kurdish journalist, political commentator and former Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s media adviser.
ISTANBUL,— Former Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s media adviser, Hiwa Osman, has stated that Turkey has lost “a historic opportunity” in its relations with Kurds over recent years, saying that Ankara needs to step up its efforts to advance policies of reform and in doing so bring the peace process — launched to settle Turkey’s longstanding Kurdish issue — to the individual level. Osman, an award-winning Iraqi Kurdish journalist and political commentator, on Friday made a speech at one of the Turkish Review magazine’s talk sessions, which have been started to raise public awareness on Turkey’s Kurdish issue, saying that Iraqi Kurds were alarmed and their perception of Turkey changed when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made a statement saying that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Islamic State group (IS/ISIS). “We all thought that it was a historic opportunity and that the PKK and the Turkish state could have been on the same side, [then he] equated the PKK with ISIS at a time when the PKK fighters were chasing the IS fighters in various areas,” Osman said, adding that their solidarity is important to getting rid of the international threat ISIS poses and to providing a new platform for their relationship. “Instead, it pushed the peace process back a few steps,” he said. “For us, the PKK is the same as ISIS. It is wrong
to consider them as being different from each other,” Erdogan told reporters in Istanbul in early October of last year, as he criticized pro-Kurdish politicians in Turkey who have slammed the government for not helping Syrian Kurds defend the Kurdish town of Kobani in Syrian Kurdistan near the Turkish border. According to Osman, in fact, ISIS did the Kurds a favor, as the militants’ attack united Kurds from all Kurdish-populated areas, including Kurdish fighters from Iraqi Kurdistan, Turkey and Syria, who are all carrying arms and trying to stop ISIS’s advances.
“It created unity, and that was a great opportunity that could have been seized by the Turkish state and turned into an opportunity to pave the way to peace,” Osman said. For Osman, the current situation between the PKK and the Turkish government is a cease-fire rather than a peace process, a title used by the government to address the stage the Kurdish issue is at for the time being. “The real challenge for all of us is turning this cease-fire into real lasting peace,” Osman declares.
Saying that a peace process is not a process or a conversation between two men, Osman said this is a process that is supposed to lay down the foundation of a strategic ongoing lasting relationship between the two peoples — Turks and Kurds — and that a “peace process cannot be between two men when one of them is not free,” urging that PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, who is imprisoned on the island of Imrali, be released in order to speed up the peace process between Turkey and its Kurdish population.
“Ocalan proved that [he and the PKK] can influence developments,” Osman said, adding that the process has to expand to a person-to-person level as it is important to look at the real problem, which is on an individual level.
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1/13/2015
Hiwa Osman, an award-winning Iraqi Kurdish journalist, political commentator and former Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s media adviser.
ISTANBUL,— Former Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s media adviser, Hiwa Osman, has stated that Turkey has lost “a historic opportunity” in its relations with Kurds over recent years, saying that Ankara needs to step up its efforts to advance policies of reform and in doing so bring the peace process — launched to settle Turkey’s longstanding Kurdish issue — to the individual level. Osman, an award-winning Iraqi Kurdish journalist and political commentator, on Friday made a speech at one of the Turkish Review magazine’s talk sessions, which have been started to raise public awareness on Turkey’s Kurdish issue, saying that Iraqi Kurds were alarmed and their perception of Turkey changed when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made a statement saying that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Islamic State group (IS/ISIS). “We all thought that it was a historic opportunity and that the PKK and the Turkish state could have been on the same side, [then he] equated the PKK with ISIS at a time when the PKK fighters were chasing the IS fighters in various areas,” Osman said, adding that their solidarity is important to getting rid of the international threat ISIS poses and to providing a new platform for their relationship. “Instead, it pushed the peace process back a few steps,” he said. “For us, the PKK is the same as ISIS. It is wrong
to consider them as being different from each other,” Erdogan told reporters in Istanbul in early October of last year, as he criticized pro-Kurdish politicians in Turkey who have slammed the government for not helping Syrian Kurds defend the Kurdish town of Kobani in Syrian Kurdistan near the Turkish border. According to Osman, in fact, ISIS did the Kurds a favor, as the militants’ attack united Kurds from all Kurdish-populated areas, including Kurdish fighters from Iraqi Kurdistan, Turkey and Syria, who are all carrying arms and trying to stop ISIS’s advances.
“It created unity, and that was a great opportunity that could have been seized by the Turkish state and turned into an opportunity to pave the way to peace,” Osman said. For Osman, the current situation between the PKK and the Turkish government is a cease-fire rather than a peace process, a title used by the government to address the stage the Kurdish issue is at for the time being. “The real challenge for all of us is turning this cease-fire into real lasting peace,” Osman declares.
Saying that a peace process is not a process or a conversation between two men, Osman said this is a process that is supposed to lay down the foundation of a strategic ongoing lasting relationship between the two peoples — Turks and Kurds — and that a “peace process cannot be between two men when one of them is not free,” urging that PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, who is imprisoned on the island of Imrali, be released in order to speed up the peace process between Turkey and its Kurdish population.
“Ocalan proved that [he and the PKK] can influence developments,” Osman said, adding that the process has to expand to a person-to-person level as it is important to look at the real problem, which is on an individual level.
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