ABSTRACT

In February 1999, during an interactive discussion about the capture of the Kurdish leader Öcalan on CNN, one of the Turkish guests, a New York based reporter for the Turkish daily Radikal, was asked a question, which compared the plight of the Kosovar Albanians with the problems of the Kurds in Turkey. The reporter could not hide her astonishment at the analogy explicit in the question. It was clear that she did not have a prepared response to such a comparison, even though, at the time, Serbia’s Kosovo question and Turkeys Kurdish question happened to occupy the top of the international agenda simultaneously and analogies of the kind were highly likely to cross peoples minds. She gave the answer that came most natural to her: “Well, from the perspective of the Turkish government, there is no distinction between Kurds and Turks.”