The AKP and the Kurdish Issue

The Kurdish Spring, edited by Mohammed M.A. Ahmed,Michael M. Gunter, 2013

Research Foundation Switzerland-Turkey, 2008

co-editor of "Comparative Kurdish Politics in the Middle East" (Palgrave Macmillan), and author of "Patterns of Nationhood and Saving the State in Turkey" (Routledge) as well as a number of academic articles on the Kurdish issue. The removal of Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) mayors from office has perhaps been the defining feature of Kurdish politics over the last year. Last week saw the HDP try to stage a march to Ankara but police also cracked down on it. Can you place this crackdown in recent years in a broader historical perspective? The origins of the Kurdish question in Turkey go back to the late Ottoman period, with the Ottoman centralisation efforts against the Kurdish emirates in the 19th century. You can also trace it back to the 19th century when different communities, especially in the Balkans, started to make demands for secession or more autonomy. In the 19th century Ottoman Turkish elites had a great anxiety with regards to the increasing power of the European states: Britain, France and Russia. And the Ottoman Empire was definitely losing its power in the international system. By the early 20th century, particularly after World War One, within the Wilsonian principles of national selfdetermination, some Kurdish organisations such as the Society for the Advancement of Kurdistan became involved in debates about autonomy and independence from the Ottoman Empire. But on the other hand Mustafa Kemal was trying to mobilise some of the Kurdish tribes in eastern Turkey for the War of Independence. One of the reasons why some of these Kurdish tribes joined Mustafa Kemal's movement was the notion of Muslim solidarity for the liberation of Anatolia from foreign invaders. But after the republic was founded, in the 1920s the Sheikh Said rebellion occurred. On the one hand it was a reaction against the abolition of the caliphate and on the other hand it was a reaction against the Turkification of the young republic. So the Sheikh Said rebellion increased the security concerns of the republican elites. The new founders of the state approached the Kurdish question as a security question. They were worried that an independent Kurdish state would be possible. In a way, the Treaty of Sevres kind of legitimised this anxiety. The Republic inherited the anxiety of the "survival of the state". Because the Armenian question had been "resolved" with catastrophic consequences, Greek attempts to control western Anatolia were resolved with the war of independence, and the Mosul question was taken to the League of Nations. The only question that could really threaten the idea of a homogenous nation state based on the Turkish language and Turkish culture-especially influenced by Ziya Gökalp, who is usually depicted as the father of Turkish nationalism but who was ironically from Diyarbakır and was of Kurdish origin-was the Kurdish question.

Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 2019

Middle East Policy, 2006

SETA Policy Brief, 2008

New Middle Eastern Studies

The AKP (Justice and Development Party) government in Turkey was committed from the very beginning of its rule to address the longstanding Kurdish issue in a conciliatory approach rather than a confrontational one, rejecting the Kemalist governments‟ dead-end conflict policies. However, the collapse of the Peace Process in September 2014, which followed the spill-over of the Syrian Civil War and the developments related to the Kurdish town of Kobane in northern Syria, have marked the end of this particular attempt to solve the Kurdish issue, probably ending any potential productive dialogue between AKP and the militant Kurds. The aim of this article is to study the AKP government policy towards Turkey‟s Kurdish population, from the early and ambitious years, all the way to the Kurdish referendum in Iraq and the effects of the regionalisation of Turkey‟s Kurdish issue. There are two questions to be addressed: To what extent is the Syria War to blame for the failure and the subsequent...