Europe

The following article written by Jouke Bakker and entitled "The rich want war, the youth a future", was published in Manifest, the organ of the New Communist Party of Netherlands (NCPN), on 4 September. 

Last month, Turkey entered a new phase in the talks between the government and the PKK: the government calls this “Terror-Free Turkey”, while most people simply call it the new “peace process”. The parliament passed a “framework law” that grants partial amnesty to members of the Kurdish armed movement. The government provided little public information about either the drafting of the law or its contents before pushing it through the parliament, prompting controversy. Soon afterwards, another story hit the headlines: leaked transcripts purportedly from various meetings involving Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK leader who remains in prison on İmralı Island.

The publication of the transcripts unsettled the parties to a process they had kept out of the public eye from the outset, and Abdullah Öcalan himself eventually denied their authenticity. Even so, when we look at everything that has reached the press so far, along with public statements and the policies now taking shape, the ideas set out in those transcripts bore a striking resemblance to the increasingly clear direction and ideological framework of the process itself.

In this article, which was published in the September issue of TKP’s monthly journal Ortaklaşa, General Secretary of  the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) Kemal Okuyan examines the political alignments and debates emerging around the process. He also returns to its now largely clear ideological and political substance, what it means for Turkey’s future, and the position and struggle of communists in relation to it.