Analyst: Both PKK and AKP want HDP to be weakened

The Middle Eastern Studies Center of top-ranking Harvard University hosted Turkish journalist-author Cengiz Çandar last week. Çandar spoke in the seminar "Understanding and Misunderstanding Turkey and the Middle East," with American academics bombarding Çandar with questions to unravel the dramatic changes in Turkey since the June 7 election. We met with Çandar in Cambridge after his Harvard rendezvous.

According to Çandar, who has been working on the Kurdish matter for years, the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) wanted the Kurdish problem-focused Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) to be weakened just as much as the government. Çandar says, "Actual surprising developments can occur on the Washington- Kurdish line," he adds.
 
Did Harvard University invite you as a speaker following recent developments in Turkey?

It was June when the invitation came. Right around that time [the northern Syrian town] Tal Abyad was cleaned of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants, taken by the People's Protection Units (YPG). The balances started shifting. There was also a new picture put forward by the elections in Turkey.  We set the title as "Understanding and Misunderstanding Turkey and the Middle East." Of course, there is a tremendous difference between Turkey in June and Turkey in September. Developments that would occur in a few years span in many other countries and regions of the world have fit into two months.  The government in Turkey engaged itself in a state of war against the Kurds and the PKK retaliated in the same aggression. This situation has shifted the June balance.

There are those that think this account had an impact on the forming of this new situation: the Justice and Development Party (AKP) chose to...