Metin Münir on the t24 news site writes that Erdoğan, after tasting his first election defeat, turned his ire and hate against HDP and its leaders. He ended the solution process. He sent the air force to bomb Kandil. PKK, the target of this attack, had many choices; without hesitation, the PKK chose the most stupid one. It started to spread terror. Maybe the leaders of the PKK, like all other aging warlords, could not accept that they are no longer in tune with the times, maybe they could not bring themselves to accept that the time has come for them to leave the initiative to the civilians. Whatever Erdoğan does, the most rational thing for the PKK to do is to pull out its warriors from Turkey and concentrate on the fight against ISIS.

Etyen Mahçupyan in Akşam writes that PKK has shot itself in the foot. At a point where it had the chance to force Turkey to a real peace, it seriously damaged its legitimacy by returning to war. Those who want to lend support to the Kurdish political movement now claim that Erdoğan has started the war because he could not become executive president or because he wants an election victory. These speculations are all baseless. The presidency is not part of the events, because a presidential system can only be introduced together with a new constitution, and even if were to come to power alone the AKP could not propose such a constitution by its own, because it would not be able to ensure the necessary legitimacy and permanency of the endeavor. Nor is there any logic behind the speculation about starting a war in order to win the election; because if such a perception has been established, you are not going to win an election anyway. Besides, if this is indeed the AKP’s purpose, then you’ll need to find an answer to why the PKK helped the AKP by executing those two police officers. So why did the cease-fire end? It ended because the PKK started to seek independence in Rojava, and because Turkey did not want to have a PKK state at its border. One should not forget that a PKK that establishes itself as a state means that there will be civil war in Turkey anyway. The AKP is not opposed to a Kurdish entity by its border; such an entity can even serve its purposes. But it is against every form of autonomy that is imposed by PKK. Thus, it did not hesitate to exploit the PKK’s serious mistake and reciprocated the invitation to end the cease-fire.

Sevan Nişanyan on the t24 news site notes that it is claimed that three groups have suffered systematic discrimination in Turkey: The pious, the Kurds and non-Muslims. This is a surprising claim. First of all, where are the leftists? Where not the leftists the ones who from the 1920s to the 1990s endured unrelenting police repression, who were censured, listed, who lost their jobs, who were deemed to be traitors to the motherland, who were arrested, tortured, hanged, and whose homes were raided by police that confiscated their “forbidden” books? The Alevis also deserve to be mentioned. And what about the opponents of religion, who the state hand in hand with “pious” society subjected to a rain of spit? Those who were discriminated were never the pious, but the Islamists. But even in spite of the threat that the latter posed, one has to concede that the stance of the state of the Turkish republic was always lenient and forgiving toward the Islamists. For instance, they never suffered massacres like the Kurds. They were not robbed of their belongings and driven away from their land like the non-Muslims were. They were not lynched like the Alevis, nor were their lives turned into a nightmare as has been the case for homosexuals.  There were moments when their organizations were dispersed, when their most militant spokesmen were incarcerated, when they lost their positions in the bureaucracy, when mainstream media used denigrating headlines about them – that’s all.  If that amounts to “systematic discrimination,” then we also need to accept for instance that the Turkic nationalists who were collectively arrested between 1944 and 1950, or the officers that were tried after 2007 were also victims of discrimination.