599). In other words, the Turkish government tried to take away the Kurds' ethnic identities; the Turks attempted to "assimilate" the Kurds into the nation of Turkey by referring to them as Turkish citizens -- and many Kurds have simply agreed to become Turks over the last 80 years or so. Meanwhile in the 1950s Kurds in Turkey "…were no longer in a position to produce major trouble for the state," and Kurds began moving into big cities in the western sections of Turkey (Yegen, p. 604). The "assimilation" strategies of the Turkish government towards the Kurds lightened up from the 1950s regarding forcible settlement practices, but then when the Kurds began to resist Turkish authority in the 1990s, the government crack down was severe, Yegen writes on pages 604-605.
At that time the Turkish state forced Kurds from their mountain villages, and burned an estimated 3,000 Kurdish villages based on "national security." Moreover, hard line policies have subsequently been enforced: a) those policies include the prohibition of any language other than Turkish to be taught; b) Turkey has established "boarding schools" that aim to remove Kurdish children from their parents in order to propagandize them in Turkish values and culture; and c) Turkey has launched national campaigns in order to encourage Kurdish children to attend -- the "Turkification" (Yegen's term) if you will, of the Kurds (Yegen, p. 606).
Today's negative realities regarding the Kurds in Turkey
A January 2009 article in the journal Insight Turkey states that the "Kurdish question" cannot be easily defined nor can the Kurds be described by an oversimplified category. But as background into understanding how the Kurdish question might be settled, Taha Ozhan and Hatem Ete offer six "types of experiences that the Kurds have gone through, all of which occurred simultaneously and are related to each other" (Ozhan, et al., 2009, p. 97). One, there has been great tensions between the Kurds living in the southeastern provinces of Turkey and the central government of Turkey. Between 1925 and 1938, for example, there were "17 uprisings" and in 1978 "martial law" was put into effect (Ozhan, p. 98). These rebellions were due to the fact that many Kurds "lost their confidence in the state and gave more support to Kurdish nationalism" (Ozhan, p. 98). Two, because about half of the Kurdish population lives in western Turkish cities (Istanbul, Ankara, Ismir, Adana and Mersin), pushed there by the forced evaluation of Kurdish villages and for economic reasons. Three, many Kurds migrated to Europe in 1980 following the military coup in Turkey, and Ozhan is calling it "The Diaspora Experience in Europe"; Kurds who became ex-patriots "have been using their political, economic and social capabilities against Turkey for more than 30 years" (Ozhan, p. 98).
Four, when the Iraqi Kurds achieved some political prominence, it gave hope to Kurds in Turkey, Iran and Syria, Ozhan explains. But on the other hand, if Turkey and Iraq do not handle the long-term interaction between the Kurds in those two countries, trouble could lay ahead. Five, the terrorist activities of the PKK obviously distracts from the otherwise reasonable demands of Turkish and Iraqi Kurds for independence. And six, the Kurds in the four aforementioned countries do not truly have a political organization that is united. This lack of organization and resolve -- due in part to ethnic differences within the Kurd community itself -- stands in the way of an acceptable settlement.
The war against the Kurds in Turkey
A journal article in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs claims that the war between the PKK and the Turkish state is "reaching a critical stage" (Gorvett, 2008, p. 38). Granted this scholarly article in a year and a half old, but it gives a picture of the war that gets very little attention in the United States and yet has been ongoing for decades in Turkey and in northern Iraq. The casualty figures that Gorvett offers are eye opening -- 30,000 to 40,000 people dead -- and most of the deaths are on the side of Turkey's...
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