Dangerous Neighborhood: Contemporary Issues in Turkey's Foreign Relations by Michael Radu

Author:Michael Radu [Radu, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781351523714
Google: nPdKDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 38505832
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

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The Kurdish Question in Turkish Politics

by Svante E. Cornell

In November 1998, Turkey’s Kurdish question returned to the top of the international agenda with the seizure in Italy of Abdullah Öcalan, leader of the rebellious Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan—PKK). Demonstrations in support of Öcalan’s release wreaked havoc throughout Europe and served as a reminder of the war between the PKK and the Turkish state that has claimed over 30,000 lives since 1984. A month before his seizure, Öcalan had been expelled from Damascus, his base for the last nineteen years, after Turkey had threatened Syria with war unless it ceased to provide a safe haven for the PKK. Having failed to find asylum in Russia, Belgium, or the Netherlands, Öcalan—apparently acting on an invitation from Italian leftists—believed he could find refuge in Italy. After heavy Turkish and American pressure, Öcalan was nevertheless forced to leave Italy and seek asylum elsewhere, but was eventually apprehended by Turkish security forces on February 16, 1999, in Nairobi, Kenya.

The Kurdish question is arguably the most serious internal problem in the Turkish republic’s nearly eighty-year history and certainly the main obstacle to its aspirations to full integration with European institutions. Most Westerners define the problem simply as a matter of oppression and denial of rights by a majority group (the Turks) of an ethnic minority (the Kurds). The civil war in southeastern Turkey that raged between 1984 and 1999 is accordingly viewed as a national liberation movement and enjoys widespread sympathy both in the West and in the Third World. The Turkish political elite, for its part, promotes an entirely different view of the problem, which is often misunderstood and ridiculed in the West. In official Turkish discourse, there is no Kurdish problem, but rather a socioeconomic problem in the southeastern region and a problem of terrorism that is dependent on external support from foreign states aiming at weakening Turkey. In reality, neither the official Turkish view nor the dominant Western perception holds up to close scrutiny. A deeper study of the problem reveals its extreme complexity, with a number of facets and dimensions that tend to obscure the essentials of the conflict.

One observation that should be made at the outset is that the Kurdish issue in Turkey differs in many respects from such recent ethnic conflicts as those in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Liberia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Rwanda. Despite almost two decades of armed conflict and thousands of casualties, open tensions in society between Turks and Kurds remain, under the circumstances, minimal. Foreigners are startled by the discovery that a significant portion of Turkey’s political and business elite is of Kurdish origin, including three of the country’s ten presidents—something unthinkable for Kosovars or Chechens—and that Kurds’ representation in the country’s parliament is larger than their proportion of the population.1 At the same time, it is difficult to refute the assertion that there is an ethnic dimension of the conflict, in the sense that a portion of the country’s population holds on to an identity distinct

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