The Republic of Turkey and Its Primary Troubles

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. Turkey's 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. Turkey's 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

Turkey's 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 Turkey's 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 Kemal's 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,