Transcript: Selim Koru interview

A discussion on the PKK, the Turkish constitution, and Erdoğan's Syria policy from late October

This is the transcript of the discussion I had with Selim Koru a month and a half ago relating to the rumored restart of a Turkish-Kurdish peace process and the PKK’s October 23rd attack in Ankara. While some of the discussion is now irrelevant given Sunday’s news that Bashar al-Asad’s government has fallen, Koru offers insight into the Erdoğan government’s approach to Syria over the years - a topic which remains particularly germane given the role Turkey plays in ongoing developments. The interview has been edited for clarity.

Alexander McKeever: So in the afternoon on October the 23rd, two PKK fighters attacked the Turkish Aerospace Industries headquarters outside Ankara. This attack killed five, I think four employees there and a taxi driver. And then the two PKK operatives blew themselves up in the process of the attack. Is there anything that you think is particularly noteworthy of this attack? The target?

Selim Koru: Well the the timing i think is what stood out most for people and certainly for me as well. This came right after Devlet Bahçeli, the leader of the nationalist party [Nationalist Movement Party, MHP], or perhaps we should say the legacy nationalist party in Turkey that's part of the Erdoğan coalition, called for a sort of a renewed peace process. He didn't quite put it that way, but that's what it seemed like. And he made a very evocative statement. He said that Abdullah Öcalan, the founding leader of the PKK who's been in jail for a long time, should be brought to parliament and should speak… should address the left Kurdish political party, the DEM, in an effort to bring about an era of peace, or something that would would overcome the the political problem that Turkey has with Kurdish identity. That seemed to be what he was saying and then very soon afterwards this attack happens… that wasn't a coincidence…probably. And the thing that most people thought was, okay, this is probably some kind of splinter within the PKK that's doing this. Because it seemed very clear that the PKK was interested in having some kind of talks with the government, with the state. The DEM Party made statements that suggested that they were interested in this. Abdullah Öcalan's been in jail for 25 years. I'm assuming that he'd be interested in getting out and walking around once more. People were talking about the release of various political prisoners and what that would look like. So yeah, that's mostly what I was thinking of when that attack happened… that it must be some kind of a spoiler within the PKK that did this.

AM: Yeah, I think that's pretty broad consensus. I mean, the PKK in the statement said that this was not related and that this was in the works from before. But I think the timing… I think it was October 1st when parliament starts and that's when you had the Bahçeli handshake photos. Then you have Amberin Zaman's report for al-Monitor on the 10th. And then Bahçeli's comments, the 22nd. And then Ömer Öcalan apparently visited İmralı, I think that day… the nephew of Abdullah Öcalan. So yeah, that seems pretty stark. I guess the target, it's kind of interesting. Turkish Aerospace Industries, most directly related to the PKK, make the Anka drone series so it's pretty direct in terms of symbolic selection. And then this sparked these these airstrikes. This has become like a reoccurring pattern we've seen in Syria now since 2022 with the Istiklal attack which was not claimed by the Pkk. That was a little strange, the the woman that they arrested, they said that she'd spent time in Idlib and it was very murky.

SK: It used to be that these attacks weren't very murky. When there was a PKK attack, it was very clear what the intention was. It would easily accomplish its goals of either hitting some kind of military target or a police target or just terrorizing the population. They used to be good at that, and then they would take responsibility for attacks. But things are very different now. The PKK is much weaker than it used to be, I assume.

AM: Yeah, at one point I worked for someone tracking the attacks over a couple of years, and the change in geography is very stark. You go from 2015 to 2016, it's almost all in Turkey. And then over the last couple of years, they've been pushed almost entirely into Iraqi Kurdistan. So all the conflict is almost entirely there. So in 2022, the Istiklal attack, that was weird. In 2023 though, you had the, I think that was also in Ankara, the General Security Directorate. And that was claimed by the PKK. And that sparked another similar round… This last week, we had about three days of Turkish airstrikes that were targeting a mix of military, security [sites] and then a lot of civilian infrastructure related to energy… to oil to electricity. And then also they'll end up targeting a lot of agricultural [sites], like grain depositories. So this has become just sort of the pattern that's happened. But I guess going back to the peace process, it seems like the main… impetus on the government side, the domestic [aspect] is tied to these constitutional revisions that Erdoğan's been, discussing or hinting at, or what's the deal with these?

SK: So a few things. A, there is the matter of redrafting the constitution or drafting a new constitution. The first four clauses of the constitution, it seems, would remain the same. And then the rest would be redrafted. And the government has suggested that they'd like a, I believe they said a more plain constitution. I think because the Turkish Constitution is such that it's a very long kind of didactic document, unlike the US Constitution, which is kind of short and it's a few principles. And then you have a Supreme Court type of institution that's supposed to sort of reinterpret that document for generations, right? The Turkish constitution is different. I think it's in the sort of French tradition of spelling things out much more clearly. So yeah, they're thinking of redrafting the constitution that way. And the idea there is that A, they don't have the seats in parliament required. And B, I think they have a sense that they represent roughly 50% of the population. And they feel like in order to do something like this, they need much broader buy-in. So they need to sort of pit the different poles of the opposition against each other and really kind of work them against each other. One phrase that... former interior minister… liked to use was that Erdoğan likes to knock people against each other, that this sort of agonistic form of pitting people who effectively work for him against each other and making them compete and seeing what comes out of that. And that's the kind of thing I think that, that the government is doing in one sense.

So the whole constitution, that stuff is is one thing another thing that is becoming much more pronounced in government media is the idea of war. Like bigger, more broader scale war. Sometimes they call it world war three sometimes they call it a regional war, some idea that borders are going to shift in the coming period and that Turkey needs to be ready and that specifically it needs to cover up its weaknesses, its chief weakness being the Kurdish issue. That's increasingly what they're talking about. And so they want to make it so that the PKK can't really destabilize Turkey as easily as it used to. Now, to what extent they're serious about this stuff, it's difficult for me to say. I mean, it could be sort of politically expedient to talk about things in this way without it being a very serious issue, or it could be a very serious issue that they might actually think about politics in these ways. And, you know, A, they might be privy to information that we don't have, or B, that, you know, they might maybe be too dramatic about certain things. I don't know. It's hard to tell.

AM: I know you've talked about Erbakan, like the idea of greater Israel within the Turkish Islamist milieu. From the outside, it seems really hard to tell real, what's just for the base, it's really sort of hard to parse. I guess just going back to the constitutional thing, so it's sort of to streamline the constitution in line with changing to the presidential system, and sort of centralizing power more in the executive?

Will Israel really invade Turkey?

SK: They've already done that, right? They've already centralized an immense amount of power in the executive so that parliament is effectively just symbolic. The presidential palace designs the laws and puts them into motion. Because the presidential palace has pretty much effectively total control over the parties that it controls, the AK Party, the MHP, and some smaller Islamist outfits and Turkist outfits. So that when they pass on a law they've drafted to parliament, parliament just passes it, right? There's no like horse trading involved. There's no like, you know, pork barrel or whatever. That process is effectively, it's pretty seamless. And there is, they also have great amount of control over the courts. And when the Supreme Court, especially, votes against them, they just ignore it. They just say, well, the Supreme Court shouldn't have ruled on this. And that's it.

AM: Okay, so this kind of goes back to the judicial issues from last year. I vaguely remember reading that you had this sort of crisis between the Supreme Court and... was it a different body?

SK: There's a Supreme Court and there's... there's a different word for it. Again, this is I believe the French tradition where there's different high courts. And they're both high courts, but they rule about different things. The Supreme Court makes rulings about the Constitution. So what this other high court did was basically say that the Supreme Court shouldn't have expressed its opinion, gotten involved in this constitutional matter at all, and just overruled it. I believe it was about the release of one of the political prisoners. I mean, technically they're not political prisoners, but effectively they are. Oh, yeah, it was the Can Atalay case. So one of the people who got elected into parliament through DEM (correction: Atalay is a member of the Workers’ Party - TİP - not DEM) was arrested already. He was in jail and he should have been released. And the court ruled that he should have been released. But the Erdoğan people had an alternative court, the other high court ruled that decision was effectively null and void.

So all that is to say that they already control everything. They want to change the constitution… the most practical reason for it is that Erdoğan's been president now, or will have been president for two terms, and there's a two-term limit. And their argument is, if they redraft the Constitution, Erdoğan gets to run again. And that's why they're doing it. I think Erdoğan would just run again. These are just words on paper. But it would be very inelegant and even they don't like that sort of thing. They prefer to redraft the constitution. It's much cleaner. And plus, they like the idea of recreating institutions and recreating foundational documents.

AM: But they wouldn't touch the first four [articles] that outline Turkey as a secular republic?

SK: So I think what they've been doing is they've kind of… every once in a while what the government does is they will have somebody relatively minor, but still fairly serious, say something, right? And it'll be like, oh, you know, we should change the [first four amendments]... Because the first four amendments, shall we say, are unchangeable, right? The document says that these four amendments are unchangeable and you can't touch them. Which again, that's just another rule somebody made up, right? You can always change it. So what they did was Numan Kurtulmuş, who's a senior member of this government, kind of suggested on the fly, he kind of floated the idea that… maybe you could change these things. And then they kind waited to see what would happen, how people would react. That's usually how they do things like this. When they want to push something beyond a certain limit, have somebody senior who's not Erdoğan say something, but then they see what happens. And the reaction was mostly negative, I think. And they seemed to have decided against it, though you can never be sure.

It's the same with this Kurdish peace process thing. They floated the idea of Öcalan being released and addressing parliament. Very extreme, very crass thing to say within sort of the boundaries of Turkish political discourse. And they were kind of curious, I think, to see what would happen.

AM: What was the reaction from the CHP and the rest of the parties outside the DEM or the People's Alliance?

SK: So the opposition right, because the opposition itself has a spectrum of right-left and Turkish right, and then the Turkish left, and then the Kurdish left and Kurdish right. I think the Turkish right within the opposition is very firmly against it as represented by the İyi Party. And Müsavat Dervişoğlu, the leader of the İyi Party, actually brought out this rope and threw it down his podium, kind of suggesting that Öcalan should be hanged. But then he also kind of said that that's not what he wanted to say. It was kind of weird. But the idea very much was, that they were against this. And they used very strong language to say that they were.

There was a sort of opposition right-wing group - that I actually advised - they put out a general poll across Turkey on what people thought of this. And an overwhelming majority of people said that they would oppose something like Öcalan coming out. I'm sure that the AK Party did its own polling. It's said that they do the best polling in the country. They do it internally. I'm sure that they've kind of gamed it out and looked at what they could do. And they seem to have decided against something like that. Certainly against calling it a peace process of any sort, but also seem to have decided against a more softer Kurdish opening, it seems. Though Erdoğan hasn't spoken about it yet, so we'll see.

AM: You mean decided since the attack on the 23rd or just in general?

SK: I don't think the attack had a big impact on this. I think it was more Bahçeli's words and the mental image that everybody had of Abdullah Öcalan being released 25 years after he was captured and addressing parliament and then some kind of Kurdish peace process happening. They just put that image into people's heads and then they pulled it, probably. Or they kind of looked at how people reacted to see if they could do it. And I think it seems like from the last couple of days of reading columns and watching some TV channels, people who I think represent the government or the sort of broader regime view are now saying, “oh, you know, everybody misunderstood Bahçeli and that's not what he wanted to say at all.” So they're backpedaling this whole thing, which suggests to me that they've decided against this.

AM: If there even was that much that they decided on to begin with. It seems very sort of bare bones… and I mean, they're basically like okay, Öcalan can to come to parliament and surrender. And then that’ll somehow solve the Kurdish issue.

SK: But they're probably thinking of something else. So the way it works, for example, with the presidential system, they kept trying and trying for years. This was deeply unpopular. They kept trying it and trying it and kept polling it. And people didn't like it. People hated it. It polled in like the 20s or the teens. It didn't work until the coup attempt. And then, boom, it polled much better. They got moving on it. That's the first thing they did after the coup. The first big thing, a year after the coup attempt, they were like, okay, now it's time to do this thing. And they did it. So I could see stuff like this changing as well if the mood of the country or the region changes.