Addressing Controversy II: Turkey and the Kurds

Abstract

Turkey’s former deputy prime minister Beşir Atalay said in an interview that during the Justice and Development Party’s (JDP) rule since 2002, almost 60 percent of all reforms and democratization initiatives undertaken were related to the Kurdish issue.¹ This statement alone illustrates the centrality of the Kurdish issue in Turkey’s political and democratic evolution. The domestic consequences and economic costs of the Kurdish issue have been all too evident: over 40,000 deaths, a military-dominated hybrid political regime, an economic bill of hundreds of billions of dollars, the institution of a regime of impunity in the Kurdish plurality east and southeast of Turkey as a result of the emergence of a dual legal system in a country that takes pleasure from emphasizing the unitary nature of its state, and the fast fraying social bondages between state and the Kurds are a few such domestic repercussions to name.