In recent days, almost everyone has spoken. Those who have encountered the Kurdish question at some point in their lives have spoken, as have those who have watched it from afar, those who have paid a price and those who have paid no price at all. Politicians, lawyers, journalists, former and current actors, those who support the process, those who oppose it, those who are hopeful and those who are doubtful have all had their say. What has emerged is a strange picture: a text that has been talked about so extensively actually has very little to say when viewed on the historical scale of the Kurdish question.

Perhaps this is why we now need to talk a little less about the law. Because the real issue is not whether a legal regulation consisting of a few articles is good or bad, but within what historical framework the Kurdish question, which has lasted for more than a century, and the Kurdish freedom struggle, which has lasted for more than fifty years, should be understood. The moment we begin to assess a great historical accumulation formed around the claims of independence, freedom and the right to determine one’s own future through the limited instruments of current politics, we not only misread the present, we also diminish the scale of the past.

This is precisely where we need to look at 15 August. It is not a history that can be confined to any legal text, negotiation process or temporary political balance. It is one of the founding moments that reorganised the modern historical memory of the Kurds. Nor is it the only such moment. Şêx Said, Agirî-Zîlan, Dersim, Anfal, Raperîn, Kobanê and Aleppo, although they took place in different periods, in different parts of Kurdistan and under very different circumstances, are historical thresholds at which the Kurds were forced to rethink their own political existence, destiny and visions of the future. What brings these moments together in a shared historical memory is not that they resemble one another, but that in different periods and in different parts of Kurdistan they reshaped the Kurds’ sense of existence, will and vision of the future.

The distinctive character of 15 August within this continuity is clear. Following the great ruptures experienced after the founding of the Republic, the long period of silence, the 12 September regime and Diyarbakır Prison, the new Kurdish generation carried its claim to intervene in its political future through its own will into a new phase with this date. For this reason, defining 15 August merely as a military beginning is insufficient to explain the political and sociological transformation it created within Kurdish society.

The meaning that 15 August carries today is greater than current politics precisely for this reason. Politics is limited by today’s balance of power, law by the existing state order, and negotiations by the conditions in which they take place. Historical memory cannot be entirely contained by any of these. The meaning of 15 August cannot be determined by a law passed today, a negotiating table established tomorrow, or a political strategy that may change on another day. That meaning has already been formed through its consequences over more than forty years, the society it transformed, the political subject it created and its place in modern Kurdish history.

Precisely for this reason, what needs to be focused on today is not so much the legal text itself as the historical meaning attributed to it. In the past, the Republic of Turkey also resorted to various legal instruments under the headings of surrender, repentance, reintegration into society and effective remorse. Their scope and techniques were not the same; it would not be correct to present today’s regulations as a simple repetition of those of the past. Yet a change in legal technique does not eliminate the question of within which political and security paradigm an issue is being defined.

Presenting a limited transitional regulation emerging after forty-two years of an extremely heavy period of conflict as carrying a historical meaning far beyond its own legal capacity creates a serious problem of scale. The question here is not whether the law is sufficient or insufficient, but the political discourse that enables a limited legal instrument to be perceived almost as the founding document of a new historical era.

The further the real capacity of a legal text becomes separated from the historical meaning attributed to it, the more …