Blog Post Two
John McCall
Dr. Jenkins
Intro to American Government and Politics
April 7, 2022
Blog Post Two
The issue faced by the Kurds, focused on in this blog post, is the discrimination and oppression they suffer from in Turkey. This discrimination occurs in public and in private, by law and by subversion, on paper and in practice. Roughly fourteen to twenty million Kurds live in Turkey, based in the southeastern region. Originally a part of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey is and has since 2003 been ruled by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a man frequently accused of authoritarianism, and who survived an attempted coup d’état against him in 2016. With the Kurds comprising about 18% of Turkey’s population, which is close to one fifth, it cannot be ignored by an objective Turk that a large portion of their population consists of an ethnic group their country has treated terribly throughout the decades. When the Republic of Turkey was formed in 1923, it was revealed to the Kurds that their ethnicity and sovereignty would not be recognized, and tempers quickly soared. Violence occurred in rural and urban areas protesting over what many considered a broken promise that an independent “Kurdistan” would form after the World War I. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the president until 1938, wanted a single Turkish identity and refused to put up with the existence, at least the visible existence, of any group or nationality that went against his vision of a single, national Turkish identity. And therefore, the existence of the Kurds in Turkey was denied, literally. In 1934 there was what became known as the resettlement law which forcibly evicted and relocated Kurds to the region of Dersim. It did not help them to already be pushed around by the government, but to be forced into a designated region showed the utter contempt felt towards them. The Kurds were referred to as “mountain Turks” and “eastern Turks.” Words deemed unpatriotic and against the national identity like “Kurdistan” or “Kurdish” were silenced and people who uttered them were shamed.
The discrimination and oppression against the “mountain Turks” continued and showed no signs of improving. In 1980 there was a successful military coup against the ruling government in Turkey. A sharp rise of Turkish nationalism followed across the country. This skyrocketed nationalism led to the Kurdish language not just being discriminated against, but legally banned. No longer were Kurds faced with being shamed and publicly ostracized for speaking their language, the threat of arrest and jailtime now lingered over them. The denial of their very existence, the disrespect of their culture, the prohibition of their language and names, forceful relocations, all consisted of a pattern of discrimination against this ethnic group in Turkey which makes up nearly one fifth of the population. The psychological effects this must have on Kurds in Turkey are hard to imagine. Many must go about their day wondering why they are such a problem in the eyes of the government and why their Kurdish ethnicity, rich in its history and culture, is seen as a negative. Cruel actions against the Kurds have often been justified as fighting terrorism, ensuring order, preventing insurrection, and so on. This may sound cliché, but one good thing the Kurds have on their side is attention from the outside world. We are fortunate to live in a time when it is hard for nations to hush up and delete their dirty deeds. The treatment of the Kurds is frequently listed as one of Turkey’s biggest shortcomings.
It is difficult for me to find, even think of, an “evidence based” solution. It of course seems so easy to say that the solution is for Turkey and its President Erdogan to simply declare that the language and culture of the Kurds will be respected by force of law, rather than be discriminated against by the threat of force. But the history of Turkey shows that this is unlikely. In the United States we pride ourselves on our cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and acceptance of people from different walks of life and points of view. Perhaps the fact that the United States is a nation of immigrants, and Turkey is not, has something to do with it.
The root problem to creating a solution is that, in Turkey, really nothing is done or passed without receiving the green light from Erdogan, for he is a dictator in practice if not officially on paper. The failed coup against him in 2016 resulted in purges of many he deemed his foes. It is up to him and him alone whether or not Turkey will grant total respect to the Kurdish people there. Perhaps Erdogan himself needs to receive, firmly and collectively, condemnation from the international world even if it only makes him defensive. It may very well prompt him to act towards ensuring better treatment of the Kurds. Turkey is a member of NATO; it is the nation wherein President Kennedy placed nuclear warheads during the Cuban Missile Crisis. One may say it is strange that Turkey, a nation which has demonstrated such intolerance to their largest minority group, is currently hosting the peace talks between Russia and Ukraine.
https://www.dailysabah.com/politics/war-on-terror/turkey-has-no-kurdish-issue-erdogan-says
https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/kurdish-repression-turkey
https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/faq/kurds-turkey
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Kurd#ref284087