On January 4th Hurriyet published an article by Taha Ozhan 'Turkey’s Kurdish problem'. "Modern Turkey emerged out of a project of radical identity construction. It was a project that aimed to build a state out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire that would be a secular state, constructed directly on references to ethnic roots and with the goal of Westernization. In the end, what came out of this demographic engineering project was a neurotic social and political structure. Like other nation-building projects in our region, Turkey’s nation building also subjugated certain groups in the new state," the article reads.
"Various ethnic groups from the vast territory of the Ottoman who found refuge in Anatolia did not experience a lot of problems under the new republic’s umbrella of Turkishness. This was partly because these groups were already considered Turks in the regions they came from and partly because they had escaped massacres in their homelands and were committed to surviving and reinventing themselves in Turkey. The real issue rose when Kurdish uprisings rose against Kemalism in response to the imposition of Turkification policies on Kurds, who were, in effect, natives of Anatolia. In fact, Kurds were the strongest community that surrendered neither to the secularist project nor to the Turkification policies of the new republic. It could be said that two of the strongest political trends in the history of modern Turkey, Kurdish nationalism and Islamism, both emerged from the Kurdish community. The most dramatic example of this is Abdullah Öcalan, who is imprisoned today. Öcalan, who has become one of the most important figures in contemporary Kurdish nationalism, identified with the Islamist movement in his earlier years," the author says.
"The Kurdish movement, on the other hand, was not able to climb out of its vicious cycle because it trapped itself in the narrow confines of nationalism and failed to distance itself from violence. Today, we are still experiencing the traumas of the same vicious cycles. When the evolution of different social and political segments, as well as the state, in Turkey is considered, the Kurdish nationalist movement has shown the least progress. In the future, as the Kurdish political movement normalizes, we will be able to see progress in the Kurdish problem," the author reads.
Hurriyet also published an article by Murat Yetkin headlined 'Military and Kurdish projects speed up together'. "It all happened in a few hours yesterday, Jan. 3. Within three morning hours the breaking news was that former Turkish chief of general staff, İsmail Hakkı Karadayı, had been taken into police custody," the article reads.
"Taken from his residence in the Fenerbahçe military compound allocated for top retired generals, Karadayı was sent to Ankara to be questioned by prosecutors, in relation to the ongoing probe into whether the resignation of then-Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan in 1997 was the result of a planned psychological-military operation," the author writes.
"It is ironic indeed that the search to find a solution to Turkey’s chronic Kurdish problem through dialogue has sped up, at the same time as the speeding up of the face off with the military regarding its interventions into politics in the recent past. It seems there is more to come in the coming days," the article reads.
