The government’s Kurdish initiative has started down a bumpy road and we can see the ups and downs as more and more political actors join the debate. 
Along the road we also see some of the missing parts of the initiative that have not been addressed in the government’s proposal but appear as we witness more debate on the initiative. One of the greatest debates came to the podium when the Republican People’s Party’s (CHP) Onur Öymen opened the Pandora’s box of the great tragedy of Dersim. Öymen intentionally discussed how the republican army suppressed the Dersim revolt during the Atatürk period and asked the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government to pursue similar policies, a move that was not met with approval. The Dersim debate, as expected, created a huge controversy and the Turkish dailies started publishing historical documents which showed the sins the military committed against Alevi communities during the early republican period.
Yet the debate could produce positive results for the Kurdish initiative on issues that the government did not address in its initial plan. To restore healthy democratic practices in the region, what needs to be done is to face the historic grievances in order to establish a healthy relationship with the Kurdish society. Recent studies on identity and democracy indicate that healing the historic scars of the collective memory of any given society is necessary to establish trust in the government once again.

Eric Langenbacher and Kyle Dandelet in their work “Collective Memory and Democratization in Germany, Argentina and Chile” refer to several scholarly works that address the issue. For instance Anne Sa’adah argues that recalling is essential to rebuilding and strengthening trust in countries scarred by the legacies of authoritarian or totalitarian rule. Based on the German “second democratization” in the 1960s and ‘70s, Jeffrey Herf argues that “daring more democracy means more truth and memory.” Jon Elster, following Neil Kritz and others, focuses on transitional justice in retrospective and prospective senses with both utilitarian and normative motives. Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis Thompson delve into truth and reconciliation commissions, noting that “there is an assumption that a society emerging from an intrastate cataclysm of violence will remain stable, and prosper, only if the facts of the past are made plain. … Proper remembrances fulfill the collective needs of badly damaged societies. … Forgetting reinforces losses of self-esteem among victims and even among victims as a group.”

Unlike what academics suggest, the government was not planning to address how to heal the collective memories of the Kurds, however, when Öymen initiated the Dersim debate the government found politically suitable grounds to address the issue. Perhaps without any scholarly knowledge on the relationship between collective memories and democracy, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in his speech mentioned the wrongdoings of the governments in the past, something which was widely welcomed by the people in the region. For instance, Kurds in Diyarbakır state that they have started seeing that Erdoğan is sincere since he asked, “Were your homes ever set on fire by the security agencies?” This shows that establishing an empathic relationship with the people in the region could strengthen the democratic practices in the region.