A New Track towards Resolving Turkey’s Kurdish Issue

The purpose of the article is to study the Kurdish issue in Turkey, the causes and ways of its settlement by the Turkish political elite represented by the Justice and Development Party. An analytical approach is used to analyze the information collected and substantiate the results obtained. The historical method is also used, which allows processing and reviewing information in chronological order. The author believes that the Turkish state did not grant the Kurds political and cultural rights, which led to the longest crisis in the Turkish Republic since its foundation. The Kurds in Turkey remain on the periphery of political life, regardless of the nature of the government, whether secular or Islamic, civilian or military leadership in the country. The Kurdish issue has moved from demanding the national rights of the Kurds to acquiring signs of a separatist trend, especially due to their concentration in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran in one geographical area, which increases their ability to communicate and receive foreign aid. The problem has been further complicated for Ankara by the fact that the Kurds in Turkey bear the brunt of the Kurdish issue. The Justice and Development Party acknowledged the failure of previous governments to resolve the Kurdish issue, as government policies based on violence and isolation increased support for the Kurds through the Kurdistan Workers' Party. The leaders of the Justice and Development Party have adopted a new policy based on the resumption of cooperation with the Kurds and the search for political solutions to the Kurdish issue. This policy made it possible to gain the trust of the Kurds, which led to significant support for the Justice and Development Party in all the elections in which it participated. The political elite of the Justice and Development Party also began to pursue a policy aimed at recreating the Ottoman Empire, which in turn created new problems for solving the Kurdish issue. The political activity of the Kurds increased inside the country, the Kurdistan Workers' Party was dissolved, and the Kurds switched to active political action. Regionally, the Syrian Kurds are approaching the creation of an autonomous region. Internationally, the Kurdish cause enjoys increasing sympathy and support from the Kurdish communities in Europe. The theoretical significance of the study is due to the structuring of information concerning the emergence and attempts to resolve the Kurdish issue in various historical periods, and the assessment of the role of the Justice and Development Party in this process. The practical significance of the study lies in the substantive recommendations of the author of the study on ways to peacefully resolve the Kurdish issue.

The article analyzes the main trends presented in the English-language scientific discourse of the 2000’s – 2020’s on the Kurdish issue in modern Turkey and the policy of the Turkish government aimed at its resolving. There is an attempt to systematize a huge array of English-language studies devoted to the Kurdish issue, published from the late 1990’s to 2021, in several problem-thematic areas. It is substantiated that modern English-language scientific discourse on the Kurdish issue in Turkey is represented by studies of M. Gunter, D. McDowall, W. Wyndham, N. Berlatsky, F. Bilgin, A. Sarihan, M. Gurses, D. Romano, K. Mckiernan, L. Riamei, M. Rubin, G. Stansfield, and M. Shareef. The discursive space for this historiography is mainly determined by: 1) conducting researches on the history of the population of the South-Eastern provinces of Turkey, the genesis of the Kurdish issue and its geopolitical dimension; 2) studies of socio-political processes in the South-Eastern provinces of Turkey, primarily the relationships between the government and the population of the region; 3) studies of socio-anthropological, ethnic, gender, humanitarian aspects of life of the population of the South-Eastern provinces of Turkey; 4) studies of the “Turkish-Kurdish Peace Process” of 2010’s, associated with a whole-scale change in the relations between the government and the people of the South-Eastern provinces in the direction of a peaceful settlement of the Kurdish issue, in particular in the context of fulfilling the Copenhagen criteria related to Turkey’s European integration aspirations.

This chapter presented an extensive analysis of the EU’s actorness in the Kurdish issue in Turkey. The chapter started by examining whether and how the EU has, as an actor, identified, formulated and represented common interests in relation to the Kurdish issue in Turkey. Moreover, the chapter included an assessment of the EU’s acceptance by Turkey, one of the two primary stakeholders. Finally, the analysis includes an assessment of the EU’s performance and assessed the broader impact of the EU’s actorness in the Kurdish issue in Turkey. Shaped by the Copenhagen criteria, the EU’s approach to the Kurdish issue in Turkey has been one of the cases in which the EU has set and reinforced its image as a normative actor. While the EU and its member states have been calculative in their engagement with the Kurdish issue, the EU’s approach to this issue has remained largely normative, as reflected in a rhetoric consisting of calls for democratisation and respect for fundamental human rights and minority rights.

This article examines the potential repercussions of the Iraq War on the Kurdish issue in Turkey. An introduction to the Kurdish problem and its securitisation in Turkey precedes an analysis of the Gulf War's impact on Turkey's policies towards the Kurds—in both Turkey and Iraq. The article briefly documents the struggle between the EU's pressures on Turkey after 1999 to improve Kurdish rights and the state's reluctance to implement reforms. Impacting reforms is the heightened sense of insecurity in Turkey after the Iraq War and the perceived threat of greater autonomy for the Kurds in Northern Iraq. In response, Turkey has identified the Turkmen minority as a key strategic concern. None the less, increasingly the ruling Justice and Development Party's attitude towards Iraqi Kurdish groups indicates the evolution of a more pragmatic approach. In conclusion, two possible options emerge: the continued desecuritisation of the Kurdish issue in Turkey or its re-securitisation.

ABSTRACTDrawn from focus groups composed of fifty-five Kurdish young people in Diyarbakır, Başer and Çelik's article concerns the young Kurds' description of the Kurdish issue in Turkey and their visions of peace. In recognition of their social and political agency, the article focuses on the Kurdish young people's framing of both the conflict and peace, based on their individual everyday observations and experiences, and seeks to understand how they frame the Kurdish issue by defining the root causes of the conflict and imagining solutions for its resolution, particularly vis-à-vis the dominant frames regarding the Kurdish issue in Turkey.

Until the 1990s, the Kurdish issue in Turkey largely involved the Turkish state, an ethnic group and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). The 2000s witnessed community-level clashes between Kurds and Turks, signalling the Turkish population's rise as an actor in the issue. This paper makes two claims. First, communal clashes indicate that Kurdish identity is not an ethnic identity alone, but is experiencing a racialization process, based on four indicators: emphasis on physical characteristics in the definitions of Kurds; linking Kurdish identity with the absence of certain moral characteristics; the increasing assignment, rather than self-assertion, of Kurdish identity; and discourses of racial extinction. Second, the racialization of Kurdish identity corresponds to historical change in conceptions of diversity. Racialization became possible after a distinct Kurdish identity was recognized but normatively unwelcomed.

Parallel to two intertwined processes of the politicization of ethnicity, religion and sexuality on the one hand, and the rise of the internet, on the other hand, hate speech has become one of the most topical issues of political debates. Academic interest on this topic has so far focused largely on the questions of (im)possibility of defining hate speech, on the hate speech/free speech dichotomy, and, thus on the possible ways of dealing with this big challenge of our times. This study tries to open a new window by resorting to the concept of human security. It argues that rival understandings of security (traditional or critical) lead to differences in perceptions of threats/harms which in turn lead to different conceptions of hate speech. This argument is illustrated through an analysis of the way the Kurdish issue in Turkey has been tackled in Ekşi Sözlük, one of the most popular web sites in the country.

While women in Turkey and around the world are commonly engaged in civic activism for peace and violence reduction, they are seriously underrepresented in formal politics; thus, not much has been written about their potential to affect decisions made to reduce violence in their societies. This study aims to understand how women politicians view violence in general and their solutions for two specific types of violence in Turkey: (1) the increasing levels of violence against women, and (2) violence created through the Kurdish issue in Turkey. Turkish politicians have become increasingly concerned about both of these issues in recent years and have designed many policies and strategies to address them. This study argues that studying the women parliamentarians’ linkage (or its absence) between the two types of violence will help understand what accounts for the differences (if any) among women MPs in their understanding of different types of violence and their solutions to them.

The Kurdish issue in Turkey has passed through complex and bloody times, which has led to political and security instability in Turkey. In this negative atmosphere, the Justice and Development Party was able to win the elections in 2002 and reach power, forming the government alone without resorting to alliances. Therefore, the Justice and Development Party tried to find a solution to the Kurdish issue by taking some bold steps and starting to announce the project of openness to the Kurdish issue. But the stages that followed these steps proved that the main goal of the Justice and Development Party was to try to find a solution to the Kurdish issue in a way that the party would control the direction of the issue and win the majority of the votes of the Kurdish voters. On the other hand, there was no unified Kurdish will to find a peaceful solution to the Kurdish issue, although the Kurdistan Workers Party announced the cessation of armed operations, but it was later found that it had exploited that truce to gather its forces and store ammunition and weapons. In addition to the regional relations of this party in neighboring countries such as Iraq and Syria, the presence of armed factions affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers Party in these countries helped to end the process of opening up to the Kurdish issue. From the foregoing, we can reach a conclusion that the parties did not have a sincere intention to resolve this issue, and that it was found that there is a fundamental problem in the Kurdish issue, which is that the only legitimate representative of the Kurds is not the Kurdistan Workers Party.

The rise of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, hereafter the AKP) in Turkey raised hopes for a genuine solution to Turkey's century-old Kurdish issue. The AKP's recognit...

That the absence of democratic inclusion usually leads to the disruption of the social fabric and renders trust and peaceful coexistence increasingly difficult needs no argument. In the absence of comprehensive solidarity, coexistence is bought at the expense of a new regime of exclusion. In this paper, we discuss this as a problem of solidarity and illustrate our argument with reference to the Kurdish issue in Turkey. We find it fruitful to approach the Kurdish issue from the perspective of solidarity especially at a time when an Islamic model of social integration presents itself as an alternative to genuine democratic inclusion. Turkey left behind one of the most difficult summers of its history as the Constitutional Court was seeking to close down its ruling party, which received 47% of the votes in the 2007 general elections. When the case of closing the AKP (the Justice and Development Party) came to the Court, and the Court’s decision to not close it down generated sighs of relief. Some commentators such as Andrew Arato saw in the decision of the Court a refashioning of its role in Turkey’s political life, i.e., its search for elevating itself to the role of initiating deliberation and consensus-seeking among the conflicting parties (as the European Constitutional Courts have traditionally been doing). During the same time frame, there was another case to close down the DTP (the Democratic Society Party), the last Kurdish party to come into being after its successors were systematically closed down by the Court. This second court case remains unnoticed and the DTP’s very possible closure does not seem to stir anything that comes close to the storms that were unleashed by the possibility of the AKP’s closure. While this selective treatment of party closure cases definitely requires attention, the context in which the closure of the DTP is being sought deserves special attention. Until the 2007 election, the DTP used to earn the votes of an overwhelming majority of Kurds who reside in the southeastern region of Anatolia. Due to the carefully planned, tremendously expensive and sustained campaign by the AKP, for the first time in Turkish history, a Kurdish party faced a serious challenge in getting the votes of Kurds in the region for the first time in the recent history of Turkey. Currently, the Islamic solidarity model is portraying itself as the only viable option for a peaceful resolution to ethnic conflict within Turkey. If Turkishness and Kurdishness create problems of integration, then being Sunni Muslims would be the grounds for membership, as the reasoning goes. As more and more disillusioned Kurds become eager to be co-opted by the Sunni-based Islamic solidarity, the more likely it is for Islamic solidarity to consolidate itself as a model of social cohesion, not merely for southeastern Anatolia where a majority of Kurdish citizens reside, but also for Turkey as a whole. While such a shift from ethnicitybased political representation to an all-embracing, catch-all type representation could be seen as a welcome development especially in its potential to end a long lasting ethnic conflict, the reasons for the shift, the assumption of an encompassing Sunni Islamic identity it relies on, and the outcomes it is likely to generate should also be investigated.

Turkey’s former deputy prime minister Besir Atalay said in an interview that during the Justice and Development Party’s (JDP) rule since 2002, almost 60 percent of all reforms and democratization initiatives undertaken were related to the Kurdish issue.1 This statement alone illustrates the centrality of the Kurdish issue in Turkey’s political and democratic evolution. The domestic consequences and economic costs of the Kurdish issue have been all too evident: over 40,000 deaths, a military-dominated hybrid political regime, an economic bill of hundreds of billions of dollars, the institution of a regime of impunity in the Kurdish plurality east and southeast of Turkey as a result of the emergence of a dual legal system in a country that takes pleasure from emphasizing the unitary nature of its state, and the fast fraying social bondages between state and the Kurds are a few such domestic repercussions to name.

How could one account for the discourse of security used by the Turkish state considering the Kurdish issue before 1984, when the terrorist attacks of the Partiya Karkaren Kurdistani (PKK) had not yet started, and hence there was no physical security threat against the state? This article aims to answer this question from the perspective of ontological (in)security. Based on Critical Discourse Analysis of state discourse, the article argues that the political, social and cultural traits of Kurdish identity created uncertainty in the Turkish self after the Sheikh Said rebellion in 1925. Tribal/religious structures that were influential among Kurds and the expression of Kurdishness as a distinct identity disrupted the autobiographical narratives about Turkishness, hence generating ontological insecurity for the Turkish state. To overcome this problem, the state relied on security discourse and securitized the traits of Kurdish identity, by which it felt threatened. As a result of this securitization, the state was able to legitimize the extraordinary measures taken against Kurds, such as forced resettlements. Securitization, in this sense, regenerated ontological security for the state, because the extraordinary measures served to suppress the Kurdish identity that threatened the certainty and continuity of the Turkish self.

This dissertation investigates associational behaviour in a context of ethnic conflict and contestation of the state. With a case study of the Kurdish issue in Turkey, it examines the position of interest associations in major Kurdish province Diyarbakir in relation to political struggles between different models of social integration by exploring the relative weight of economic interests and collective identity politics in influencing associational strategies. This examination draws on the theoretical literature on interest associations and their impact on social order and democracy. In particular, the analysis adopts the framework of Streeck and Schmitter to understand the logic of associational action by looking at the environments of membership and influence. The analysis, however, modifies this framework by emphasizing the duality seen within both environments, as well as the transitional context that the contestation of the state and socio-economic changes contribute to. The empirical analysis focuses on a selection of interest associations with either de jure or de facto compulsory membership (Chamber of Commerce and Industry; Bar and Medical Associations; and labor unions in the municipal sector). It provides an in-depth analysis of strategies of each association in relation to its membership and its interlocutors, as well as a broader analysis of organized interests in relation to other ‘partial regimes,’ that is, institutionalized sites for the political representation of social groups such as political parties and social movements that represent diverse ‘interests’ and ‘passions’ reflecting the cleavages in society. The dissertation relies on archival research and four-months of fieldwork, focusing on the last decade for the examination of associational politics.

Journal Article Dealing with the Past: Transitional Justice, Ongoing Conflict and the Kurdish Issue in Turkey Get access Yeliz Budak Yeliz Budak * * PhD candidate, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London, UK. Email: yeliz.budak@postgrad.sas.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Journal of Transitional Justice, Volume 9, Issue 2, July 2015, Pages 219–238, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijv002 Published: 01 April 2015