PEACE SUBJECT INTRODUCTION Engin Erkiner
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PEACE ISSUE INTRODUCTION Engin Erkiner The word ‘introduction’ in the title means introduction to the subject. The rest of the article will not follow, at least not after this article. The purpose of the introduction is only to point out the characteristics of a peace movement which has never been established in our country and which should be different. For many years, the issue of peace has been on the agenda in connection with foreign events. For example, in the early 1950s there was a campaign against sending troops to Korea. The Peace Association in the 1970s was more concerned with international nuclear arms limitation agreements than with domestic peace. The issue of domestic peace began in the late 1980s. There is a war, a civil war within the country, and the word peace is not used because it was initially thought that the war would be won. Various initiatives and organisations are set up for peace, but they remain dysfunctional. In no country has peace been realised by making calls to the warring parties. What is to be done? Since there is no clear view on this issue, how peace will be achieved has not been concretised. Turkey is a society of violence. Violence by men against men, men against women, men and women against children, violence against animals, violence against nature... Violence in this country cannot be reduced to army-police violence. This is the main reason why our people, including the Kurds, are alien to the idea of peace. You fight; when you seem to be winning, you do not take peace seriously; when you start losing, the peace you want is not taken seriously by others. Turkish society is a militarist society. Militarism has a broad social basis. Turkey is one of the world's leading expansionist countries, and this expansionism, plus the establishment of an arms industry and increasing arms exports, bases and troops in countries near and far, is supported by a large part of society. The axis of the struggle for peace in this country must be militarism, not the Kurdish question. There has been no armed conflict within the borders of the Turkish Republic for several years. The PKK has lost the armed war. The war continues outside the borders with low intensity. Here, too, Turkey clearly has the upper hand. The Turkish state does not want peace. Why should it? Having one of the most experienced armies in the world in guerrilla warfare, bringing the rural guerrilla to the brink of extinction with armed drones, exporting military trainers especially to African and Balkan countries; all of this was achieved by going through a civil war. Peace would be a more meaningful demand in a militarist society if the war had been seriously forced. This is not the case. DEM's demand for peace will not be heard by others, peace will remain a demand remembered on 1 September. A lasting peace movement can start as follows: Firstly, Turkey's military activities should be inventoried. Bases, military advisors, mercenaries; the inventory is vast. Secondly, leaving NATO should be kept on the agenda with its justifications. Thirdly, disarmament, the reduction of the size of the army and the use of the resources allocated to it in other areas should be advocated. Fourthly, it should be advocated that important problems, including the Kurdish problem, should be resolved through negotiations. In the second half of the 2000s we founded the European Peace Assembly and for the first time in our history we published the Peace Newspaper (Barış/Aşiti). It did not last long because Kurdish friends did not like such an initiative, which was not under their control. It was a period of ceasefire, everyone was talking about peace, but soon both the newspaper and the process would come to an end. We would see that those who made fun of defending peace, who defended war in the mountains, would be unable to move after about 15 years. Another country, but still. It would be useful to learn how the peace movement in Germany transformed a militarist society.
