Perhaps Turkey has never used tear gas in its 90-year history as much as it has done in the last ten years.

There is a remarkable rise of banal and campaigning Turkish nationalism. A tension between competing national identities might challenge Ocalan’s rhetoric and the new democratic state.

The EU-Turkey accession negotiations slowed down not because Turkey was not interested but because Turkey demanded fair play in the negotiations.

The late Kurdish politician Serafettin Elci once said that this generation is the last Kurdish generation that has a chance to achieve peace.

For the first time in Turkey’s history, the top military commander stood alongside Ms. Gul and Ms. Erdogan, wives of the president and prime minister respectively, both of whom wore headscarves in the official reception at the Presidency mansion.

Turkey’s involvement in the Syrian civil war is not desired by Turkish civil society, but this it seems is the price you have to pay if you wish to be an economically and politically stable regional power.

Inspired by the Syrian Kurds’ recent experience, the PKK seems to have aimed at organizing a Kurdish uprising in the Hakkari and Şırnak provinces of Turkey. But do the Kurdish people support such an uprising?

How can we believe that the Assad regime, at the brink of falling in his own country, supported the PKK to lead such an attack? Even if we think irrationally and believe the Turkish government, how can we deny the existence of the Kurdish question?

The logic of nonviolent action should be strategic and sound tactics should be used to challenge the power of Assad.