By Can Öztaş
On Aug. 10, Turkey’s parliament passed what many will call an amnesty for PKK members, on the strict condition that no one call it that. The word appears nowhere in the law, which is titled, in Turkish, the Law on Strengthening National Solidarity and Social Integration.
In Turkey, political power rarely limits itself to making law. It also writes the political vocabulary through which law must be understood, telling society when something is peace, betrayal or order.
The issue is not only the content of the law. It is an older habit: political power decides what words are permitted to mean.
ONE HABIT, MANY BANNERS
This habit appears across different periods, in different ideological costumes. The early Republic instructed society in the language of modernity and secularism. The Democrat Party spoke in the name of the people while discovering the force of majoritarian certainty. The military, especially after 1980, rebuilt public life through the vocabulary of order, discipline and national security. Turgut Özal changed the language again, with development, markets and pragmatism. Later, the AKP arrived with democracy and freedom from tutelage, then continued with its own drafted rhetoric of “yerli ve milli” (local and national).
The words changed. The instruction stayed.
Each period taught society not only what to support, but how to name it, and how to name dissent. Some words became patriotic. Others became suspicious. Some legal concepts were treated as proof of civilization. Others were dismissed as foreign impositions.
That is why Turkish politics often feels impossible to discuss. Peace, terror, reform, betrayal, amnesty, immunity, justice, national will, the rule of law have already been used, wounded, confiscated, returned and used again. Every state renames what it does; euphemism is no Turkish invention. What is particular here is the completeness of it: across a century of different governments, scarcely a civic word has been left unclaimed.
A PEACE BY GAZETTE
The framework law enters this landscape, presented through a legal language of dissolved or deemed-dissolved organizations, public order, social peace and reintegration. Peace here does not arrive; it is certified. Parliament passed it on the 10th; the Official Gazette printed it on the 18th; and it will not truly begin until a third date, the day the National Security Council rules that the PKK has ceased to exist and prints that fact too. This is a peace one might be enjoying without having been told. This week the board that will one day sign that notice met for the first time, to draft its own rules of procedure.
The framing came from the president’s chief legal adviser: extraordinary periods, he explained, are run by extraordinary methods, and the law’s own words, the organization’s “actual end,” its “complete liquidation,” are not to be read in their legal sense, but as practical processes. The dictionary is handed out at the door.
The opposition appears fragmented, hesitant or contradictory, because the law arrives with its own authorized language. To accept the language of peace may sound like accepting the government’s terms. To reject the language may sound like rejecting peace itself. A figure who speaks of peace must explain that this does not mean surrender; one who speaks of justice, that it does not mean revenge; one who speaks of law, that it is not indifference to violence. Before any political sentence can be completed, it must first survive interrogation by someone else’s dictionary.
This is not only about the Kurdish question. Many of Turkey’s unresolved problems could have been addressed long ago through the ordinary language of constitutionalism: equality before the law, freedom of expression, local democracy, cultural rights, proportional anti-terror legislation and compliance with international obligations Turkey had already accepted. That a question has legal aspects, though, has never obliged the state to treat it as a legal matter. Instead, ordinary law is repeatedly delayed, exhausted or securitized until the state returns with an extraordinary vocabulary of salvation.
This is how political vocabulary becomes custody: every available word has been locked into a prior meaning.
There is a final irony the debate largely missed. Having spent four decades making the words of peace unsayable, amnesty recast as surrender, settlement as betrayal, the state cannot reach for them even when it wants to. So, it smuggles peace into the statute book under a bureaucratic alias, hostage to a dictionary of its own making.
In Turkey, power wins not only when it silences words. It also wins when every word arrives already accused.
