Turkey and the Kurdish today - Essay Example

Civil uprisings have often taken place leading to deaths of thousands of people, most of them being Kurds and members of KPP. However, recent attempts by Premier Egrogan to bridge the gap between the Kurds and the Turkish armed forces have yielded positive results. This paper goes on to discuss the history of the Kurds in Turkey, how they have been treated over the period of time and what attempts have been made by the current government to solve this issue. Essay The Republic of Turkey, as it is officially known was founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in first quarter of the nineteenth century.

According the official census of 1990, the country has a population of fifty seven million people (Gunter, Michael M., 2007). Although ninety nine percent of the population in the country consists of Muslims, the rest one percent is also allowed complete freedom to carry on their religious and social activities just like their Muslim counterparts. The Kurds comprise of a significant number of people in Turkey. Even though the national language of Turkey is Turkish, Kurds speak a different language which is a mixture Indo and European Languages.

Discrimination against the Kurds has always been a key issue in this country and this community has been facing a hard time ever since the creation of the country. Kamal Ataturk in his life time did discuss the issue of Kurds at various special forums. In the Turkish parliament session he once said, “North of Kirkuk there are Kurds as there are Turks, and we never discriminated against them”. However the situation hasn’t been as good as it sounds. Even after eighty two years of independence, the fourteen million plus Kurds of Turkey have been facing a hard time - often being prejudiced against, kicked out of their homes and villages, tortured, raped and killed.

To maintain their status quo, the Kurds have fought back time and again against the government. Although there have been various fights, none of them has been as fierce as the one in 1984 by the banned organization called Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Over the years these fights have resulted in thousands of deaths with almost forty thousand of them being of members of the PKK. The major reason for the conflict between the Turkish state and Kurds has been the call for a separate province. The Iraqi Kurds have always called for a separate province, Kurdistan, and just the mere existence of this word is a taboo for the Turkish state.

The rationale behind this fear is that the creation of Kurdistan by the Iraqi Kurds can provoke the Turkish Kurds to rebel against the state and take with them bits of Turkish territory. For decades the Turkish government has seen the issue of Kurds as one of terrorism caused by the PKK. However it is very interesting to see that when various countries back the PKK (due to the fact that PKK is seen by others as a party fighting for the rights of the Kurds), the Turks say that this goes on to prove that no one really wants to see a healthy Turkish economy to grow into an European superpower.

Even if all what is mentioned were to be true, factually Turkey is home to almost 17 million Kurds, many of them being those who don’t even support the PKK and its acts. It is also widely reported that Kurds have been treated very unfairly in Turkey. This point was proved when a report from The European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance spoke about injustices prevailing in Turkey. The report says that the Kurds’