The Republic of Turkey and Its Primary Troubles
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The Republic of Turkey and its primary troubles stem from the past seven decades of acrimonious policies directed at the indigenous ethnic Kurds. The main problem, now, is the
Kurdish popular insurgency on its hands, in Turkish occupied Northern Kurdistan.
The Kurdish question has long been covered up and denied by the state of Turkey,
but recent events has forced Turkey to concede that it has a serious Kurdish
insurgency on its hands. Turkeys inability to deal with this situation is the
result of the past seventy years of cultural, political, and human rights
abuses directed against the Kurdish population. In fact, this “separatism” is so
out of hand that the Turkish government has incessantly appealed to its allies
and advisories alike to help counter the escalating Kurdish aspiration to
succeed from the Turkish republic. Turkeys sputtering and deteriorating economy
is directly related to the long Kurdish struggle for independence. Turkey has
spent over eight billion dollars or twenty percent of her GDP to combat the ever
deteriorating predicament in northern Kurdistan, and should spend more in the
future(Labor). Because of the violence, the once prosperous tourist business of
Turkey has now lost about $1.5 billion dollars annually since 1990. Many people
now talk openly of another possible military coup, there were three major
military coups during the last thirty years (Alistair) these circumstances in the
state of Turkey have also hurt her chances of ever joining the ever wealthy
European Union and battering its ailing economic situation. The depth of
Turkeys domestic and ethnic dilemma is one of the many that have arisen after
the end of the cold war, yet the cold war is a simple answer to a much more
complex one. The factors that have arisen to contribute to this civil war were
created far before Capitalism versus Communism, East versus West, or U.S versus
the Soviet Union. In order to really comprehend the holistic situation in
Turkey one must first be familiar with the complete history of the Turks and
Kurds.
The Kurds of Turkey constitutes, by far, the largest ethnic minority group in
Turkey. The estimate of their population, however, is very dubious because of
the past Turkish policy to deny the very existence of any minorities within the
borders of her state. In fact, past Turkish rhetoric has been that there is no
official Kurdish problem in Turkey, because officially no Kurds exist. We can
ascertain that the Kurds make up between twenty-five and thirty-three percent
of the Turkeys population. This would put the Kurdish population about twelve
to twenty million (Morris). Because of past and present forced Turkish
assimilation practices, the Kurds live in all parts of the country, but most of
the Kurdish population is concentrated in the southeastern part of Turkey. They
represent a high percentage of the population in fifteen provinces and take up a
total of thirty percent of all of Turkey (Kendal). Economically, the Kurds are
the poorest inhabitants of the country. The per capita of a Kurd is one-tenth of
a Turk living in Istanbul; well below the poverty line (McDowell). While the
rest of Turkey has modernized and adopted some capitalistic practices, the
Kurdish areas, by contrast, are underdeveloped and exploited by feudal landlords.
I believe that the Turk must be the only lord, the only master of this country.
Those who are not of pure Turkish stock (Kurds and Armenians) can have only one
right in this country, the right to be servants and slaves (McDowell).
After Kemals death, more successive and liberal minded regimes came to power.
The 1960 coup by the army attempted to Turkicize the whole of the Kurdish region.
Every single street, river, mountain, village, or city was given Turkish name to
the very last detail. What little hope the Kurdish population had in the hope
more or less disappears as the coup never really brought out fundamental change
for the Kurdish people. The rights of the Kurds were still non-existent, the
Kurdish language denied to them, and their culture still prohibited. The
successive coups of 1971 and 1980 always tended to bring Kurdish freedom and
self-expression to a halt. To justify a coup, the army would state that there
was a planned Kurdish uprising. Nevertheless, throughout the 1960s and 1970s,
Kurdish nationalism did emanate in the form of small underground publications
and newspapers, but they were always instantaneously banned and the editors
immediately apprehended and given lengthy jail terms. Throughout all the
repression, the Kurds were able to participate in political life, although under
forced Turkish identities(Gunter). Today the foreign minister of Turkey, Ardal
Inunu,