ABSTRACT
Kurds make up about 15 per cent of Turkey’s population of 72 million and successive Turkish governments have acknowledged, either explicitly or implicitly, the failure of the longstanding official policy – derived from the ideology of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic – of assimilating them into an exclusively Turkish, secular and centralized nation-state.1 But whenever those governments followed up by proposing alternative approaches that were intended to address Kurdish demands for cultural recognition, and thus counter periodic outbursts of Kurdish separatism, their proposals proved too contentious and politically unrewarding to be adopted. Until very recently, therefore, the ‘default position’ remained unchanged: Turkey’s governments refused to allow the free expression of Kurdish language and culture. And when confronted by a Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) insurgency that began in 1984, they relied on the same draconian methods that had been used in the past to suppress Kurdish cultural demands and root out separatism in the Kurdish region in the country’s south-east.
