Turkey Addresses PKK Challenge with Kurdish Language Reforms

For many years the Turkish state has insisted that no ethnic minority problems exist in Turkey. According to the official discourse, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan – PKK) is a manifestation of terrorism and Kurdish unrest, resulting from poverty and underdevelopment, in the predominantly Kurdish southeast region of Turkey. For decades, successive governments in Ankara promised to fight insurgency in the southeast via economic development programs, thereby “drying the swamp that produces terrorism” (Hurriyet, November 18, 1997). Most of the southeast remains impoverished, however, and even outside the southeast, many Kurds in Istanbul, in other western Turkish cities, in Europe, and in PKK camps in northern Iraq continue to oppose the Turkish state.Read More