PHOTO: PKK fighter alongside the Kurdish organization’s flag in northern Iraq, August 2014

Turkey’s Government, facing criticism over a stalled Kurdish peace process, has responded by invoking the primacy of “security”.

Interior Minister Efkan Ala said in a Sunday statement:

We will never make concessions on public order, while carrying out this resolution process. We will make it happen by maintaining public order. In other words; it will not be in the form of either this, or that. It will be in the form of both this and that. Both our nation’s life and property security will be guaranteed and this problem will be resolved and no longer be a ‘hobble’ for Turkey.

Deputy Prime Minister Yalcin Akdogan, while exalting the government’s approach to offering Kurdish citizens public services without discrimination, echoed:

Protecting the rights of each and every citizen of ours and dignifying them is a duty and a debt of honor for us, and we will fulfill it. Both the resolution process will go on and we will never make concessions on public security and order.

Akdogan will represent the government in meetings on Monday with the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP), who have pressed for “mutual and simultaneous steps” to renew the peace process. The HDP is hoping that the session will lead to the visit by its members to the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), Abdullah Ocalan, next week.

HDP senior official Pervin Buldan, who will attend the meeting, called for de-escalation of tensions fed in October by Turkey’s hesitancy in supporting the defense of the Syrian Kurdish enclave of Kobane: “Both the government and the movement should simultaneously take steps, synchronically. This process will develop with these mutual steps.”

(Feature