Etyen Mahçupyan in Akşam writes that the PKK can only achieve its aims in Syria if its acts in concert with Turkey. However, the HDP/KCK has adopted the opposite course. This can only mean one thing: The organization [the PKK] pursues the logic “everything or nothing” and it has only two possible supports in order to attain its goal: The U.S. and the people of the region… There is no need to make an additional effort to prove the unreliability of the U.S. Thus we get to the real issue: The question of the degree of support for the PKK’s strategy from the people in the region… That’s an important question, because if you act according to the “everything or nothing” logic, and you in fact lack the support of the population, then there is a high probability that you are going to forfeit the obliging stance of the U.S. at your next move, leaving you with a “nothing” as a result…

By Gareth H. Jenkins (vol. 4, no. 21 of the Turkey Analyst)

On November 1, 2011, a court in Istanbul formally charged 23 suspects with membership of the Union of Communities of Kurdistan (KCK), an umbrella organization controlled by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and ordered that they be imprisoned pending trial. The suspects included Professor Büşra Ersanlı, a respected academic from Istanbul’s Marmara University, and Ragıp Zarakolu, a prominent publisher and human rights activist. The decision to arrest Ersanlı and Zarakolu is another blow to already fading hopes that the AKP government’s new appetite for confrontation will be replaced by a desire to solve the Kurdish problem through dialogue and conciliation.