KURDS IN TURKEY

Kurds in Turkey

Kurds in Turkey

Basic Facts

Kurd, part of an linguistic and ethnic grouping existing in the eastern Anatolia's Taurus Mountains, the western Iran's Zagros Mountains of, portions of northern Syria, Iraq, and Armenia, and additional nearby locations. Majority of the Kurds reside in neighboring areas of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey—a somewhat slackly definite geographic area commonly mentioned to as Kurdistan (“the Kurds Land”). The name has several connotations in Iraq and Iran, which legitimately recognize interior entities by this name: Iran's northwestern province of Kordestan and Iraq's Kurdish autonomous region. A sizable noncontiguous Kurdish population also exists in the Khorasan region, situated in Iran's northeast.

Turkey's Kurdish minority has suffered discrimination on the ground of language since the founding of the modern Turkish State in 1923; and its continuous fight for recognition of its language, for autonomy, and eventually for independence, has been checked systematically and continuously by Turkish armed forces garrisoned in Kurdistan. Besides outlawing the use of Kurdish, Turkey has refused any recognition whatsoever to Kurds as a distinct people having a history and culture of their own. Kurds are sometimes disdainfully referred to as "mountain Turks" and characterized as “bandits” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2011).

Political Situation

For many years Turkish Kurds based their insurgent activities in neighboring Iran, Iraq, and Syria, all of which have Kurdish minorities of their own. However, in recent years, they have begun to operate openly within Turkey with some aid and support from the Kurdish Workers' Party, based in Syria and aligned with the territory of the former Soviet Union, which also has a Kurdish minority. The goal of that party is the establishment of an independent Marxist Kurdish State in what is now eastern Turkey.

In 1988, more than 60,000 Kurdish guerillas and their families, fleeing from northern Iraq to escape what was described, ...