ABSTRACT
After the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the new secular government started a homogenising process of nation-building by promoting the Turkish language. Reactions against the new government’s programme, especially by religious conservatives and Kurds, were brutally suppressed. By the 1950s many in Turkey thought Kurdish identity successfully suppressed, yet in 1978 Abdullah Öcalan founded a modern Kurdish party, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK). Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the PKK maintained a powerful insurgency, turning the forgotten Kurdish issue into the top security concern of the Turkish state. Since the 1990s the Kurds have started participating in elections, adding a non-violent branch to the Kurdish question.
