Cizre after 'the successful conclusion of Turkish military operations', March 2016. Emrah Gurel /Press Association. All rights reserved.The Kurdish south-east region of Turkey has turned into a war zone, costing many civilian lives and serious political instability. This is all the consequence of the failure of the 2013 peace talks between Turkey and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which was intended to end 30 years of conflict. To have achieved this would have necessitated a fundamental change in the traditional mind-set of the Turkish state in its approach towards the Kurds, an attitude which had evolved over a hundred years. However, evidence indicates that the current conflict in the south-east is firmly rooted in its historico-political context.
Shortly after World War I, the first president of the Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, promised autonomy for the Kurds, declaring that they would be free to choose their own rulers.[1] However Turkey has never permitted anything of the sort. Turkish state policy-makers aim was to establish a modern country based on “an identity that was explicitly Turkish”.[2] In the aftermath of World War I, state policy-makers “insisted that ‘anyone who is a citizen of the Turkish Republic’ was a Turk”.[3] After signing the Lausanne Treaty (1923), the Turkish state established the policy of denial “that the Kurds have a separate ethnic identity … they are not Kurds but ‘mountain Turks’”.[4] As Yeğen puts it, particularly “from the mid-1920s until the end of the 1980s, the Turkish state ‘assumed’ that there was no Kurdish element on Turkish territory” at all.[5]
Reaction to this policy came in the form of several Kurdish uprisings, the latest one manifested in the Partiya Karkerén Kurdistan (Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK)), which quickly “developed [a] broad organizational structure and displayed an enormous capacity to mobilize Kurds both within and without Turkey”.[6]
