The peace process between the Turkish government and the Kurdish movement that has been in progress since last December is not the first attempt of the AKP government to find a political solution to the PKK issue. The first experiment was in 2009 that ended in what is best described as a fiasco. The title of the process, which began in July 2009 and fizzled out in October, was changed three times by the Erdogan government, which was sensitive to the reaction of the AKP constituency and Turkish public in general: It started out as ”Kurdish opening.” When faced with resentment of the word Kurd, that was discarded and replaced by ‘’democratic” and the process was thus renamed "democratic opening."
By the time the process was abandoned in October because of a strong reaction of the Turkish public to victory festivities and demonstrations by tens of thousands of Kurds to the return of several PKK guerillas unarmed but in uniform to Turkey through the Habur gate, the official border crossing between the Kurdistan regional government and Turkey, the name of the process had become ‘’National Unity Project.” The most salient reason for the ”opening fiasco” of the AKP government was its lack of preparation intellectually and politically and its inexperience.
Another aspect which was ignored was the reality that the peace process was actually a “negotiation process.” Not only professionalism was lacking in contacts with various units of the Kurdish movement that was a part of the conflict, another similarly important dimension was totally overlooked. These were the ‘’parallel talks” — the talks focusing on persuasion of segments of the public who could fear and be intimidated by radical changes that peace would bring and resort to reactive social and political actions that could impede the process. That would be talking with the Kurds, while simultaneously carrying out talks with the Turks.
The segments that could fear the process were nationalist Turks, whether religious or secular, who constitute the majority of the population.
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