Kurdish women pleading with a Turkish soldier.The Kurdish peace process is over and a huge wave of violence has started in Turkey’s south-east. The violence follows the killing of 33 Kurds in the Suruc bombing and the subsequent murders of two policemen in nearby Viransehir. Many fear that what is happening in Kurdish region of Turkey now is a return to the 1990s which were marked by widespread violence and state crimes. In this period much of Turkey’s south-east became what Agamben has described as a state of exception: martial law became normalised during the 1990s and the Kurdish region experienced intensely high levels of state crime including village destruction, massacres, extra-judicial killings, disappearances, mass forced displacement and endemic torture.
It seems that the nature of the Turkish state in relation to its Kurdish minority has not changed since the dark days of the 1990s – the inherited fear of Kurdish separatism and the Kurds themselves remains. We prefer to call it Kurdophobia, given that for 15 years the leaders of the Kurdish movement have made clear their demands are not for a separate nation but instead for equal citizenship in a democratic state.
For the past two years negotiations between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Turkish government had resulted in a peace process – the aim of which, for Kurdish leaders, was an end to the discrimination, human rights violations and violent conflict which the Kurdish community had long suffered at the hands of the Turkish state.
