Turkish politics is passing through one of the sharpest, most staggering, and perhaps most paradoxical turning points in its history. To understand Law No. 6551 on National Solidarity and the Strengthening of Social Integration, and the new process embodied by it; we need to set aside our value judgments, our idealized concepts, and those flawless democratic scenarios we desire. In saying this, I am not bracketing the normative framework; I am saying what should be is one thing, what is is another. Looking at “the given” does not mean legitimizing it. It is merely a necessary stance to avoid going where an analysis detached from reality will take us—that is, nowhere.
Because politics is not a “computer game” playing out on our screens according to the norms we have set ourselves; politics proceeds over “the given”.
A “Business” Without Heroes and the Naked Truth of the Law
I do not find it right to attribute tremendous meanings to this process, to generate an overly euphoric atmosphere that exceeds the law’s claim. There is no hero here, nor is there anything deserving of heroization.
Let’s name it clearly: Disarmament is targeted, and a de facto amnesty is provided. However, while this is done, the parliament is completely sidelined. The will that put its hand under this business is mobilizing the executive power entirely for it; in the process, the judiciary is virtually liquidated and transformed entirely into an executive organ. A massive shield of impunity is brought to those managing and implementing the process. We are faced with an “elite pact,” where over three hundred MPs learned what they signed only afterward, which started with surprises, and where there is no bottom-up concretization or singularity.
This finding is no longer a theoretical claim. The parliamentary (TBMM) minutes of August 10, 2026, recorded the very nature of the elite pact. CHP Deputy Group Chairman Murat Emir said the following from the rostrum: “You hid this text, you hid it from everyone, you hid it even from your own group.” In the same session, Istanbul Deputy Gökhan Günaydın registered the scene: “Everyone saw this law three days ago, three days ago; you tell us, including yourself!” Özgür Özel set the most concise framework: “They conducted negotiations behind closed doors, squeezed the social issue into a bilateral negotiation environment, and personally wasted the opportunity for social consensus with their own hands. A text known by 3 people… has been sanctified and submitted for Parliamentary approval.” The declaration of the obvious…
The final vote of the law completes the picture: Out of 562 votes cast, 468 accepted, 88 rejected, and 67 abstained. The fact that the vast majority of five different parties—with such different political positions, including CHP and the Yeni Parti, which are in systematic opposition to the government—voted yes is the numerical proof of the elite pact. But this figure also carries a paradox: 468 acceptance votes are the result of a will gathered without seeing the text beforehand, unaware even of their own groups. Parliament has been effectively transformed into an approval authority for a fait accompli.
When looking at the legal structure of the law, the picture becomes even clearer. It envisages a five-year postponement for sentences under fifteen years, and a ten-year postponement for those over fifteen years. Intentional homicide and pre-2005 life sentences are excluded. The trigger condition for the implementation is the determination by security institutions that the PKK has “ended its actual existence” and the decision of the National Security Council. That is to say, the main decision determining the enforcement of the law has been left to the executive without being subject to judicial review. Article 10, which removes the legal responsibility of officials, also disables the accountability mechanism.
Society wants peace; but the how and the procedure of this peace are not being negotiated with society. This is an extra-constitutional move foreign to Turkey’s constitutional and legal universe, where it is said, “You want peace, we designed it and are giving it to you.”
The move is inevitably so, because the constitutional order forms the normative ground of exclusion, assimilation, denial, and destruction in this country, and everyone is aware of this. In short, the consequence of a century of constitutional preferences is being confronted, and while this is somehow being eliminated, compliance with those constitutional preferences would not have been possible anyway.
The “Diseased Surgeons” Paradox and the Mirror of 1908
The most bitter truth we must face while reading the process is this: those performing the surgery, namely the decision-makers, are themselves a part, carrier, and product of this traumatized political universe. Their problematic relationship with democracy; their populism, their lack of trust in the norms and institutional structures of the rule of law are no coincidence. It is a historical irony that the culprits of the dramatic collapse of the last ten years can take this extra-constitutional step today by drawing power from exactly this practice.
The minutes confirm this irony from another dimension. Throughout 76 pages, no one asked, “what was the pre-op protocol, how was the sterilization done, is there a complication plan?” — or those who asked these questions remained in the minority and their right to the microphone was restricted. Each group spoke from its own positioning: from the AKP/MHP front, the assurance of “our leadership is performing this surgery with an unshakable will, feel safe”; from the DEM front, the enthusiasm of “we are finally lying on the operating table, we have been waiting for 50 years”; from the IYIP front, the objection that “these surgeons are planning a murder, not a surgery”; from the CHP and Yeni Parti, the reservation that “it is time for the surgery, but the surgeon needs to wash his hands first”. In the end, they lay on the table without washing hands.
While reading this picture, 1908 constantly comes to my mind. Looking outside the official narrative, I see this in those days: The Committee of Union and Progress called it a final attempt; Armenians, Greeks, and Kurds gave a “yes” support with their own reservations and conditions. Languor and disbelief dominated the brotherhood slogans in the squares. There was no real enthusiasm in any of them; there was exhaustion, doubt, and hope for a last chance in all of them. Then came the real repression. Resources became scarce, threats intensified, and the structural incompatibility within that artificial unity exploded and revealed itself. First, the genocide of Muslim Turks in the Balkan War, the political and social trauma accompanied by severe despair and helplessness, the wars undertaken without confronting this, the similar treatments applied by the traumatized to those weaker than themselves, a struggle for independence carried out with a final Turkish-Kurdish alliance, and immediately after, the construction of a monist, ethnicist, strictly centralist, exclusionary constitutional order. The other destructions caused by this preference…
There is a similar risk in today’s process. What Erdoğan and Bahçeli need from this pact, what Öcalan’s leadership needs, and what the DEM Party owes to its electorate may seem to overlap in the comfort of a period of peace. We cannot know for sure what this really is, because transparency is far removed from this process. But when real pressure comes, when the economic crisis deepens, or when the nationalist base rebels, will this equation hold? It did not hold in 1908. Structural incompatibility is revealed in moments of real tension.
However, it should also be added: the lesson of 1908 was not that the initiative was wrong; it was the lack of institutional guarantee to carry it. The real risk of today’s process lies exactly there.
The Collapse of the Paradigm: The Bankruptcy of a Language
The minutes showed me one thing with crystal clarity: the collapse of the 100-year paradigm is no longer an abstract historical-political thesis, but a live linguistic phenomenon poured from the mouths of MPs at the parliamentary rostrum.
When you read the IYIP speeches carefully, you see that every speech follows the same syntax template: “We are not against peace, but…” “We want a Turkey without terror, but…” “We want weapons to be laid down, but…”
What comes after the “but”? The fear of Sèvres. Martyrs’ blood. The moral bill of history. What does not come? An alternative peace model, a proposal for a different process, another negotiation framework.
The most striking example of this template surprisingly appears in the most technical, most legal speech of IYIP. Hakan Şeref Olgun questioned the disarmament sequence, the lack of a DDR mechanism, the objective verification criteria of the conditions — these were real and important constitutional questions. But the place he returned to at the end of his speech was this: “It is stated that the terrorist organization ringleader in Imralı described this regulation as a key law. So we ask: The key to which door, which doors will be opened with these keys?” Öcalan’s approval is considered a sufficient reason for the invalidity of an argument. The shift from the legal framework to the paradigmatic framework happens right here.
Turhan Çömez framed his speech by reminding that August 10 is the day Sèvres was signed. Selcan Taşcı, starting from Mudros, said, “You will go down in textbooks as Damat Ferit.” Yavuz Aydın wanted to list the names of 7,500 martyrs one by one; the Speaker of Parliament did not allow it. All these gestures do the same thing: compensating for rational lack of alternatives with moral-emotional weight.
This is the very collapse of the paradigm. The old answer — “fighting terrorism is enough” — can no longer be said openly; IYIP MPs did not say “we do not want peace” or “let weapons not be laid down.” But a new answer has not yet been produced either. In this void, language takes refuge in symbolic resources: Sèvres, martyrs, the founding myth. The weight of history takes the place of the capacity to propose rational alternatives.
No IYIP speaker said, “Let this law not pass, we will start a different peace process with these steps.” Because that language has not been established yet. The paradigm has collapsed; but what will replace it cannot be articulated. The “yes, but” template is the language of this inability to articulate.
Why is there no Society? The Chicken-Egg Dilemma
It is a justified question why the process is not based on a social dynamic, a transparent negotiation. But there is a structural vicious circle to be understood here. The Turkish political elite, as a reflection of its own traumatic genetics, destroyed the conditions that would enable democratic deliberation for decades. And now, decisions are being made in an environment that is the product of this destruction.
Let’s state what should be: first, confidence-building measures (the list of legal and political steps such as the implementation of Constitutional Court-ECtHR decisions, the deactivation of State of Emergency practices, abandoning the use of the judiciary as a political instrument, a gentlemen’s agreement between parties regarding the equal distribution of the HSK to the parties in parliament and ensuring its independence could be extended), then a political discourse built on the acceptance of equivalence, intra-party democracy and the autonomization of the parliament, the creation of a public sphere where historical traumas can be processed, the reactivation of suppressed intellectual capacity, and ultimately the establishment of a peace architecture within a constituent assembly process. This sequence solves the problem, dries up the hundred-year swamp. You would make the country soar…
Now this is not our reality. These are the actors we have, whether you like it or not; there is a political elite pact, there is no intra-party democracy, intra-organizational democracy is already another issue. Solving the issue with a referendum in such an environment, beyond being a romantic dream, would turn into a very handy weapon in the hands of those who want to sabotage the process precisely as a product of this toxicity. The Yeniden Refah’s referendum demand should be reminded here: Muhammed Ali Fatih Erbakan directly demanded a referendum for the parts regarding amnesty. The fact that it is a small opposition party voicing this demand, while the main political actors remain silent, shows that the absence of society is not only an observation but also a political preference.
I am not saying “Society is not ready, so let’s give it from the top.” I am saying that those who made society unready are the hundred-year constitutional order preferences, the political, social, and cultural reality that emerged according to these preferences, and the elites who are the product of this, and there is no easy recipe for exiting this vicious circle.
Extra-Constitutional Foundationalism: A Descriptive Observation
By saying “extra-constitutional,” I am not carrying a positive or negative judgment; I am trying to define a reality. There is a constitution, but it is a constitution that has largely lost its effectiveness. Laws are not enacted within the meaning and spirit of the rule of law, but in line with the interests of the current power centers. This law was also shaped by effectively sidelining the parliament and the judiciary: hundreds of MPs signed blank pages, the commission accepted it without touching a comma, and similarly in the general assembly. A process put on autopilot…
But we must also see this: this process reveals not only a law, but effectively a new foundational dynamic. I am sure the old is going. I do not know what this foundationalism will bring; this is not a textbook development, there is a dynamic operating according to a social and political legality. And it is to be expected that the actors within this dynamic will want to make their own individual agendas effective by taking advantage of this and conduct negotiations accordingly.
The real risk of the extra-constitutional move is the precedent effect it creates. This thing done for peace today sets a precedent: the executive can sideline the constitutional framework on the grounds of legitimate urgency. This logic can be operated for different purposes in the future. A precedent is created not by the moral value of the purpose, but by the mechanism. Of course, this question also hurts: Should the possibility of peace that emerged after a hundred years have been evaluated in this way?
The Truth Seeping into the Genetics of the State and the Issue of the Victim
Despite all its flaws, destructiveness, and negativities, the process embodied by this law is historic. The Kurdish issue has now ceased to be limited to academic literature and has turned into a reality that the state has to accept on its desk and screen. What the Kurds have been subjected to following a jointly conducted War of Independence is a historical reality that the state now has to accept.
Here it is necessary to underline an important distinction regarding the issue of the victim. While addressing the violence produced by the Kurdish issue, we must not forget the historicity of that violence. The roots of terrorism lie not only in an organizational preference; they also lie in the policies of denial, assimilation, and massacre that the state has maintained for decades. This does not legitimize terrorism; but it shows that the state is not in the position of an ordinary victim in this process.
The minutes concretize this ambiguity: four radically different definitions of victim coexisted at the same parliamentary rostrum. For IYIP, the victims were martyrs’ families and veterans — the release of the perpetrator was considered a second layer of victimization. For AKP and DEM, the victim was the whole society affected by the conflict; the shopkeeper of Diyarbakır, the families forced to migrate from the village, the people of the region who could not see investment. For CHP and Yeni Parti, the victim carried cases of individual rights violations: Selahattin Demirtaş, everyone imprisoned despite the ECtHR and Constitutional Court decisions. For DEM, the victim was the 100-year identity victimization of the Kurdish people: “100 years ago, Kurds were pushed out of the law.” These four definitions never met on a single common ground.
The state is both the addressee of terrorism and the responsible element that cannot be ignored in producing the conditions that feed it. Therefore, the state has a separate and heavy responsibility towards the victims of terrorism; but this responsibility can be fulfilled not by reducing the victim-perpetrator balance to a simple black-and-white picture, but by seeing it within historical integrity. This debt to the relatives of martyrs and veterans must certainly be paid; however, this debt can be paid not at the expense of ignoring the historical grievances of the Kurds, but by confronting those grievances together.
A 100-year narrative and the state practice based on this narrative are on the verge of fading into history. This situation will create a great loss of meaning for broad segments who have built their lives and ideologies on this rote learning. The responsibility of the decision-makers is not to put a vindictive counter-idealization in its place while destroying this old idealization; but to be able to create a safe space for those whose old narrative has collapsed.
Resource Depletion and Rationality
People, as homo sapiens, can often make very bad political choices. But at some point, when they see resources running out, they can also make a rational choice. What makes this process possible is not a moral transformation of the actors; it is a breaking point where each side recalculates the cost of continuing with the cost of stopping. In the conflict resolution literature, this is called the “moment of ripening”: negotiation becomes possible when both sides see that they cannot reach a better place by fighting. The actors did not change; what changed is the balance between the cost of continuing and the cost of stopping.
The minutes also concretize the magnitude of this calculation. Mahir Polat reported that 8,486 security personnel lost their lives and the material cost reached 2.3 trillion dollars. Cemalettin Kani Torun framed this figure even more strikingly: “As of the first quarter of 2026, the total gross debt stock is 518 billion dollars. The annual resource going to terrorism is about five times that. In other words, terrorism has constituted about 5 times our total foreign debt.” Gürsel Erol also set up the calculation in reverse: “With this money, 1,150 new dams, 66,500 firefighting helicopters, 460,000 schools, 11 million classrooms could have been built.” The resource depletion argument is spoken in the minutes by giving names and numbers.
But the same logic also looks forward: if this rationality is the product of resource depletion, if one of the parties feels one day that the resource advantage has returned, the same rationality can operate the process in reverse. The fragility of the process lies exactly here; it sits on an interest-based foundation, not a moral one. If a value ground to hold is not established when the balance of interests deteriorates, the mechanism collapses. For this reason, negative peace — the cessation of gunfire — is both necessary and insufficient.
Common References or Disintegration
The real meaning and real danger of this process stands far beyond the legal mechanism. Suppose for a moment that everything worked out. Weapons were laid down, postponements were implemented, deprivations of rights were lifted. Then what?
The process is valuable because it can create new common references; if the past can be confronted, if equivalence is accepted, if historical traumas and their political and constitutional consequences are truly processed, the construction of a new society with new references becomes possible. This is a technical goal, but at the same time it is the existential issue of the process.
The minutes revealed this existential question with crystal clarity: everyone used the same words at the same parliamentary rostrum, but no one said the same thing.
| Word | IYIP | AKP/MHP | DEM | CHP/Yeni Parti |
| Martyrs | Victim, source of objection | Honor, debt of loyalty | Object of apology, confrontation | Responsibility, commitment |
| Brotherhood | “We were already brothers” | “To be strengthened” | “Conditioned rights” | “To be re-established” |
| Democracy | “Under threat” | “To be strengthened” | “Initial step” | “Insufficient” |
| Republic | “Protection” | “Strengthening” | “Completion” | “Democratization” |
The words are the same, the meanings are exactly opposite. While DEM says “completion of the republic”, IYIP says “protection of the republic”. While AKP says “strengthening brotherhood”, DEM says “recognition of the right to equal citizenship”. The only truly common point is this: “We want the violence to end.” This received support from every party. But there is no consensus on how this will happen.
Societies that truly have common references attribute the same meaning to the same words. The minutes show that this process is far from producing common meaning, only sharing common words. This is not the failure of the process; it is the determination of where the starting point is. The criterion of success will be whether those common words can be attributed a common meaning over time.
Because it has now become mandatory to accept this: no reference to the old is valid. Kurdish national consciousness, middle class, capital class, and intelligentsia have been formed. This reality is clearly seen not only by the Kurds in the DEM line, but also by Kurdish elements outside it and even by elements opposing the process. A matured national consciousness cannot be taken back; this is a sociological reality, not a political preference.
This tells us the following: “frozen conflict” is no longer a sustainable balance. The upcoming binary is much sharper: either a peace built with new common references, or fragmentation. The bill of failure is heavier for this reason; not only a process collapses, the worst option within this binary is activated. The certain issue is that Pandora’s box is wide open…
The Tragic Void
Even if we believe in the potential of the process, there is a void that is very difficult to fill.
The construction of a true peace architecture; far beyond a leaders’ pact, requires the intellectual and institutional capacity to understand transitional justice, constitutional design, and truth and reconciliation mechanisms. What made South Africa permanent was not the legal framework of the TRC process, but the construction of a common narrative that penetrated the depths of society. What held Northern Ireland was not the articles of the Good Friday Agreement, but the mutual recognition beneath those articles. What kept Colombia on this path was the presence of international law experts, civil society, and independent institutions.
Turkey has none of these in this process. These capacities have been liquidated, exiled, silenced, or self-silenced over the last decade. The silence that emerges when the question “Figures to construct peace” is asked is the biggest structural dilemma of the process.
On top of that, I add this: anti-democratic practices, not confidence-building policies, are running parallel to the process. This is the most self-defeating contradiction. A peace process essentially has to say this: “We are ready to change the system that produces the conflict.” But if the system does not change, if the conflict is merely frozen, what emerges is negative peace; the sound of weapons is cut off, but justice, recognition, and equality are not produced. Negative peace is fragile; because what keeps it alive is not institutions, but the lifespan and “unshakable will” of leaders.
There is No Innocent Party
I see that no one is innocent here. The state produced these conditions through decades of denial, assimilation, and violence. The PKK, within those conditions, also caused much destruction, including violence against civilians. The political elites both produced the trauma and fed on it. Society was shaped within that trauma; largely a victim, but also to some extent the carrier of this political culture.
This determination exempts no one. But it says this: waiting for clean hands is not very realistic. And the same determination also creates an accountability problem; because the legitimacy of demanding accountability must always be based on a certain claim of “innocence”. The premise “there is no innocent party” can easily be used as a shield by the powerful. We must pay attention to this risk.
Perhaps the more functional question is this: which of the current actors’ interests overlap more with breaking the cycle, and whose interests with sustaining it? The answer does not provide a guarantee; but in my opinion, it transforms the absence of innocence into an exit point from a deadlock.
The Exception of the Yeni Parti
In a massive set of wrongs and impositions, the only exceptional stance worth noting under the roof of the Assembly came from the Yeni Parti. The party, while stating its own institutional decision, left its MPs free in the voting. In such an anti-democratic climate, you may see following a “democratic path” as ontologically wrong, you may evaluate it as scratching the charisma, I respect that. However, in this picture where the deputies were left alone with their conscience, the justifications of those who voted yes as well as those who voted no contained highly respectable evaluations.
The most personal and most self-critical speech of the minutes belongs to Ahmet Şık, who voted yes in this process. He analyzed the IRA, the Irish peace process, international comparative examples, the inadequacy of the monitoring board in Article 7, and the lack of accountability mechanisms. After listing all these objections, he said: “All the criticisms, concerns, and warnings I have voiced regarding this bill remain valid. But this does not require us to stand in the way of the responsibility we feel towards the prices paid and the will for solidarity and peace carried from generation to generation.” And he cast a yes vote.
This is a choice, not a paradigm defense. And perhaps for this reason it is the most honest speech of all the minutes: neither embracing with enthusiasm nor rejection with anger. Fully aware of the deficiencies, but deciding to “take ownership today instead of leaving everything to demand tomorrow.”
What Would I Have Done?
At the end of all this analysis, I ask myself this question: What would I have done if I were in parliament, in that general assembly?
I would probably rebel, saying, “Is this what we get from the historical opportunity Turkey caught after a hundred years? Was a whole life, a whole acquisition and struggle for this?” But when the moment of voting came, I would say “yes”.
This is not the “not enough but yes” (yetmez ama evet) attitude demonized by a segment in political literature; it is something far, far behind that. All of the institutional and legal criticisms directed at the process and its actors are justified. But what makes “yes” possible is this: I see that turning back is no longer possible. The Kurdish national reality is on the table and will stay there. It is no longer possible to keep this structure under pressure indefinitely; that option is out of the picture. The real binary ahead of us is peace with new common references, or disintegration. And within this binary, this initiative, with all its flaws, still harbors a less destructive possibility than disintegration, which is the cost of stopping.
There is an urge here for life, not death, to be decisive, for blood to stop, for an integration to begin. It is a very modest, but never worthless, primitive effort to hold on to life. There are no great expectations, no enthusiasm; just a vote cast with the awareness that a process has started and that this could evolve into a much better or much worse place.
Turkey’s political codes will be updated, this seems inevitable. With the irregular initiative of not very clean hands. Because there were no other hands; there was no one innocent. And what falls upon us is to try to calmly understand this attempt to dry up the century-old swamp of this country with the irregular hands of those who created it, without idealizing, without distributing moral judgments.
The bill for failure will be heavy. But the bill for the absence of the attempt itself would be even heavier.
The Sin of the Spectator
Throughout 76 pages at the TBMM rostrum, no one fully asked the question, “what are we building together?” Everyone asked, “what is this process doing to me?” AKP said “it strengthens us”, DEM said “it recognizes us”, IYIP said “it threatens us”. And no one asked, “how do we establish a common ground of meaning?”
This is the limit of the elite pact. But this limit does not only belong to the Assembly hall.
We too — intellectuals, academics, journalists, those who claim to be intellectuals — asked the same question. We asked, “what does this process do to us, what does it substitute us for, what historical category does it put us in?” We did not ask, “what can we build within this process?”
We were spectators of the elites we criticized. But the spectator has a sin too.
This spectatorship takes two forms, and both are equally problematic. The first is to repeatedly catalog all the flaws of the process and wait for “clean hands” to arrive. Clean hands will not arrive immediately — we already discussed this above. Waiting for clean hands is allowing the pact elites to occupy the process. The second is to perhaps embrace and benefit by closing one’s eyes to those flaws. This is another problem; because giving up criticism to defend destroys the most valuable thing we can build — an honest common ground of meaning — right from the start.
Then what should be done?
I borrow Ahmet Şık’s words in a slightly different way: “To take ownership today instead of leaving everything to demand tomorrow.” This was said in the context of a parliamentary speech; but it is equally valid in the context of intellectual responsibility.
Taking ownership today means the following: Trying to establish a common framework of victimization while four different definitions of victims coexist. Engaging in the construction of a conceptual ground while the same words are used with opposite meanings — not leaving the question of what brotherhood means, what democracy means, what republic means to the political elites. Striving for the reproduction of that capacity while the institutional capacity for historical confrontation has been liquidated. Creating mechanisms for monitoring, documenting, and making the process accountable.
Remaining a spectator is taking an active position. Silence also consists of a choice. And the most fundamental ethical question for those watching this process is to be able to add the question “What do I contribute?” next to the question “What do the elites contribute to the pact?”
Peace may begin with an elite negotiation; but it survives through a process of producing social meaning. The actors of that meaning production process are not those in the Assembly hall — or not only them. Those reading this article are also potential actors of that process. Continuing the spectatorship is transferring that potential to the elite pact.
There is no innocent party. Including the spectator.
14th August 2026
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