One day after his invitation caused an “earthquake” in the Turkish political scene Devlet Bakhcelileader of the Nationalist Action Party (MIR) and its government partner Recep Tayyip Erdoganto the Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan to appear in the National Assembly to publicly denounce the PKK‘s armed action, a terrorist attack – for which the PKK claimed responsibility via Telegram on Friday – struck the main facilities of the Turkish Aerospace Industry (TUSAS) on the outskirts of Ankara, leaving behind 7 dead (among them the two perpetrators) and 22 injured.
Ocalan
In the meantime, the Turkish authorities had allowed, after 43 months, Ocalan to receive a visit to the island of Imrali in the Propontis, where he has been held for the last 25 years. The leader of the PKK, through his nephew Omer Ocalanappeared receptive to Bakhceli’s proposal, stating that he has the power, if conditions permit, to transfer the Kurdish resolution process from the armed conflict to the political sphere, essentially accepting the disarmament of the PKK.
It should be noted that the 180-degree change of course against the Kurds, a tactic to which President Erdogan seems to be tacitly consenting, had been initiated by Bakhceli, an ultra-nationalist and previously unyielding enemy of the Kurds, since the resumption of the work of the Turkish National Assembly on October 1 . A sensation was then caused by Bakhceli’s handshake with MPs of the pro-Kurdish party DEM – as the pro-Kurdish party HDP was renamed to survive because Bakhceli has requested its closure.
the “pride”
The two dead attackers in Wednesday’s attack, a man and a woman, have been identified as members of the PKK, which is designated a terrorist organization in Turkey, the US and the UK. Turkish analysts see the attack on TUSAS as a “message from the PKK to Ankara”.
According to the Turkish press, the attack on the “pride” of Turkish industry states that the PKK “doesn’t stop the armed struggle” and that “is capable of hitting critical facilities.”
They don’t want peace
“Obviously, one or some of the many factions of the PKK do not want peace. Perhaps the current leadership of the PKK wants to maintain power and does not want Ocalan’s release. It is simply impossible to say at this point what exactly motivated the group’s terrorists to carry out Wednesday’s attack.” says the former US Deputy Secretary of State to “Vima”. Matthew Bryza, specialist in the area.
If Turkish airstrikes against around 50 PKK targets in Iraq and Syria on Thursday, in Ankara’s response to a PKK strike a day earlier, “they specifically targeted PKK structures that oppose the peace process, maybe the Bakhceli plan will stay on track” adds the American diplomat.
The Turkish analyst Doan Tillich considers that it is still too early to draw conclusions on whether the strike torpedoes the Kurdish resolution process. “We must first see the reactions of all parties. It is possible that the terrorist attack will have exactly the opposite effect and a solution will be finally reached with the Kurds” comments on “Step”.
“The PKK attack shows us something else” he tells us Hussain Bajipresident of the Foreign Policy Institute of Turkey and professor at METU University in Ankara. “That Ocalan is not that strong and that the armed wing of the PKK does not believe that the developments launched in the last few days will have a successful outcome. The Turkish president declared his determination to fight the PKK. If the pro-Kurdish DEM party does not distance itself from the PKK, the government will stop any discussion that has started about the Kurdish.”
“How can anyone consider it possible to dissolve the PKK because Ocalan will ask for it, even if he gets amnesty?” asks a Greek diplomatic source with a term in Turkey, speaking to “Vima”, who at this stage can predict with certainty only one development: the “marginalization” of Ocalan by the PKK.
Kurdish consensus
“Some facts are pretty obvious and don’t require much analysis” the journalist points out to us about the turn of the Turkish government Omer Senjar. “While there may be secondary reasons, the main one is one: the constitutional change that will allow Erdogan to run again for the presidency of the country. The government does not have enough votes in the National Assembly to amend the Constitution, so it needs Kurdish consent.”
The Turkish professor at Glasgow Caledonian University Tarik Basbouoglu has a different interpretation of Bakhceli’s “overtures” to the Kurds: the Erdogan government seeks “economic stability” by attracting foreign capital to Turkey, through and through the Kurdish solution. The former co-chairman of the pro-Kurdish HDP party Sezai Temeli he posits another reason: “Erdogan is worried that the Kurdish solution will be done in his absence by players in the Middle East” he tells us.
However, the security gaps in TUSAS are questionable, as well as the statement, with which the Iraqi branch of the PKK claimed responsibility, that the attack “it is not related to the political agenda being discussed in Turkey for the last month.”
The future of the Gulenists inside and outside Turkey
The natural end of 83-year-old Fethullah Gulen last Monday in a hospital in Pennsylvania raises two questions in the four continents where his network is active: whether anything will change in Turkey and who will “inherit” the organization of the powerful Turkish imam who lived in self-imposed exile in the US from in 1999, after he “broke” with Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“The Gulenists were already hunted down and uprooted from Turkey after the July 2016 coup that they were linked to by the Erdogan government. Therefore, the organization’s influence inside Turkey was already zero and it will remain zero,” Ali Tirali, the head of the Turkish think tank IdeaPolitik, told “Vima”. “Whatever balance is formed within the organization, the Gulenists will never again become as powerful in Turkey as they were before 2016,” authoritative Turkish analyst Murat Getkin tells us.
Arrests
In Turkey, Gülen’s organization has been labeled “terrorist” and is called by the “slanderous” term, as its members consider it, “FETÖ” (an acronym that means “Gülenist Terrorist Organization” in Turkish) instead of “Hizmet”, as it is her name – hence the arrests in Turkey of those arrested in recent days on social media Gulen. His death removes a “thorn” from Turkey-US relations as Ankara persistently but in vain sought his extradition to Turkey.
Divisions within the organization of Gülen, Erdogan’s ideological mentor in mild political Islam, were already present before his death, with two “protagonists”: Hizmet treasurer Imam Mustafa Özcan, architect of the direct collection mechanism of 15% of revenue from all branches of the organization internationally, and general secretary Cevdet Turkioglu, wife of the late leader’s brother’s daughter and known as the organization’s “property tycoon”. The war is expected to intensify, with Hizmet money at stake – the US, for example, funds the Gulen Foundation’s schools with $250 million a year.
Break;
The fact that Abdullah Aimaz, the head of Hizmet’s European division, has threatened that he may “if necessary” leave the organization reinforces the view among analysts that a split is not out of the question. In the event of a “bloodless” split, Aimaz is expected to continue to control the European and African divisions, while the American and Asian divisions will come under Turkioglou.
“Whatever leadership emerges, the organization cannot remain the same,” Tirali estimates. “The internal discipline and the cohesive fabric, which the leader ensured with his physical presence, even though he had dementia in recent years, is being lost. However, the network of the organization in more than 100 countries, without having political aspirations, has access to the centers of power there and will remain locally strong.
The sequence
The violent succession scenarios are rejected as baseless, speaking to “Step” from the USA, Alp Aslandoan, Gulen’s right-hand man and executive director of the Hizmet NGO “Alliance for Shared Values”, introduced to us as ” the personal translator of the Turkish Muslim scholar”.
As a more likely scenario for the next day, he sees the co-direction of the Hizmet movement by “an advisory body” through the boards of hundreds of NGOs and foundations internationally. He bases the smooth transition into the post-Gülen era on the fact that they were already working “clock-wise” in recent years, even though Gülen himself “didn’t play an active role” being sick.
Gülen, a poor boy from Erzurum in southeastern Turkey, is believed to have been supported by the US since the 1980s because he expressed the moderate Islam that Washington wanted as a buffer against the developments created by the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
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