Allies and Enemies: Pro-Kurdish Parties in Turkish Politics, 1990–94

Abstract

Preventing the development of an ethnic Kurdish cultural and political movement has been a priority of the Turkish state since the Kurdish-led Shaykh Said Rebellion of 1925.' Nevertheless, beginning around 1959 this effort was steadily if slowly undermined, and events of the past ten years suggest that it has indeed failed. Not only have Kurdish activists gained some measure of international recognition for themselves and for the concept of Kurdish ethnic rights,2 but promoting the notion of specifically Kurdish cultural rights has almost become a standard litany for a wide array of Turkish civic and state actors, from Islamist political parties to business organizations, human-rights groups, prime ministers, and mainstream newspaper columnists. Although the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and its insurgency against Turkey have claimed a great deal of academic and popular attention, it is these diffuse but public re-considerations of minority rights taking place within legitimate Turkish institutions have contributed the most to the sense that past policies of coping with the “Kurdish reality” are ultimately unsustainable, and that it may be difficult, if not impossible, to return to the climate of earlier years, when discussions of ethnic difference were suppressed, limited to the private realm, or confined to the fringes of radical politics.