Turkey's Kurdish Challenge

摘要

Turkey has been wrestling with its Kurdish issue since the foundation of the republic in 1923. The early Turkification' policy of the Kemalist elite met strong resistance among the Kurdish minority and sparked several outbreaks of unrest, violently suppressed, in the Kurdish areas in the east and southeast. In 1984 the issue took on a new dimension when the newly founded Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) began conducting terrorist attacks against Turkish territory from safe havens in the Qandil Mountains of northern Iraq. The struggle against the PKK has so far cost 40,000 lives and has hurt both Turkey's internal development and its relations with its Western allies, especially the United States.