Turkey's Racism Problem

by Uzay Bulut • August 16, 2015 at 5:00 am

The U.S. Department of State needs to analyze the Kurdish issue more closely and carefully. When they do, they will see that the problem should not be called "the Kurdish Issue;" it would be more just to call it "the Turkish Racism Problem."
Kurds in Turkey have always been brutally oppressed, even when there was no organization called the PKK.
Kurds are not the ones who started the war in Kurdistan. Kurdish leaders have openly and frequently made it clear that despite all of the state terror, mass murders and oppression they have been exposed to, they wish to live in peace with their Turkish, Arab and Persian neighbors. There is a war imposed on Kurds.

Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the PKK, after his capture by Turkish special forces in 1999.

Turkey's authorities keep saying that the Turkish "security" forces do what they do -- arrest or kill Kurds -- only when Kurds carry out "terrorist" activities, or only when the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) attacks targets in Turkey. Nothing, however, could be farther from the truth. Turkey's attacks against Kurds have always been intense, even when the PKK declared unilateral ceasefires.

Regarding 2014, when there were no clashes between the Turkish military and the PKK, Faysal Sariyildiz, a Kurdish MP for the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), said, "During the last year, regarding the Kurdish issue, 3,490 people have been taken into custody, 880 people have been arrested and 25 people have been killed with police bullets."

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Turkey's Multiple Wars

by Burak Bekdil • August 16, 2015 at 4:00 am

At home, the AKP is fighting tens of millions of secular Turks, atheists, Kurds, Alevis, the PKK, the DHKP-C and the clandestine network of Gülenists. Not a small list.
In addition, Turkey does not have full ambassadorial-level diplomatic relations with Syria, Israel, Egypt, Libya and Yemen.

The big angry people in the Turkish house still believe that they will one day be the toughest guys in the neighborhood whom everyone fears and respects. They do not even realize that often they are just the neighborhood's bad joke. Pictured above, Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (left) and his political-ideological nemesis, Fethullah Gülen (right).

To avoid fighting multiple enemies at multiple fronts is an old military strategy. Particularly in the last five years, Turkey's Islamist rulers have chosen to do the opposite.

First, they deliberately polarized the society along pious-secular Muslim lines in order to reinforce their conservative voter base. In 2013, they brutally suppressed millions of demonstrators who took to the streets to protest the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). They accused Israel and the West (including Western media, a German airline and even "intergalactic forces") of masterminding the protests.

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