BY SEMIH IDIZ
MILLIYET- It's unclear if the latest council meeting of the Socialist Internationalist (SI) in Geneva was good or bad for the Republican People's Party (CHP). If the CHP were expelled from the SI, this would reportedly please not only the AKP, but also the left in Turkey, because most leftists in Turkey don't understand what this party, which has nothing to do with social democracy, is doing at the SI. In addition, it hasn't escaped the notice of Western social democrats that the CHP supports the Turkish Penal Code's notorious Article 301, thus violating the basic principles of social democracy and unabashedly reflecting a militarist and nationalist face.
In Sweden, many have started to say openly that they are ashamed of sharing the same roof with the CHP. In addition, those who saw the Turkish-EU Joint Parliament Commission meetings know the chill wind between the CHP and European social democrats. Not a single word appeared in the foreign press about CHP leader Deniz Baykal's speech at the event. When Baykal started speaking, Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani left the hall in protest, and all the reporters followed. This situation showed who the focus of international attention is.
Talabani was there as the SI's guest of honor with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. However, accusatory questions in our press asking why Talabani and Barzani were there suffice to show how these issues are covered in Turkey. At this stage, there's no way that the Turkish public would know that the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) is a member of the SI, that there is a `Working Group for the Kurdish Issue' within the SI (which includes Iraq's Kurdistan Democrat Party, KDP, and Turkey's Democratic Turkey Party, DTP), and that this group convened in northern Iraq in May 2006.
There's also no way they can know why Baykal's speech was disliked in Geneva, whereas Talabani's speech, which ended with his call to neighboring countries not to intervene in Iraq's domestic issues, got international media coverage. We should also stress that Baykal's speech was of course full of truths. If there were not a political dialogue gap between the CHP and Western social democrats, this would have been understood. However, at this point the CHP needs to convince Western social democrats about the political view that it claims to espouse.
In sum, for now the CHP being expelled from the SI is a matter of wishes, not reality. However, it's also clear that the SI has its eyes on the CHP. So we can say the CHP faces a dilemma of its possible expulsion from the SI. Even if the CHP claims otherwise, there's no way a political rhetoric peculiar to the extreme right can fit in with the social democratic view.