Turkish Government has had many high-ranking Kurdish officials, including multiple presidents and prime ministers.
There have been more Kurds served in the Turkish Army than all the other armed organizations combined.
Majority of Kurds in Turkey openly support the Turkish Government, especially against the PKK terror.
Several Kurdish organizations in Iraq, Syria, and Iran support the Turkish Government, especially against the PKK terror.
PKK kills Kurds. PKK kills Turks. PKK will happily kill you if doing so benefits the crime and propaganda business they have been profiting for decades.
Let's not parrot some politically charged material as facts without having any actual understanding about such sensitive matter.
Just to clarify, %20-25 of the population is Kurdish in Turkey. In elections, PKK affiliated legal party gets half of the Kurdish votes and other half goes to Erdogan roughly. So, there is no single Kurdish identity in Turkey, more like split between these two. Ofcourse, there is a few percent which is not among these two. So, if you ask is there any Kurdish people in the government, yes there are a lot. Erdogan gets half of the Kurdish votes, so we can say Kurdish Erdogan supporters have enough representation. PKK affiliated party is not in government, because they didn't get enough votes but they are in parliament ofcourse representing their %10 votes.
I don't think PKK cares about Erdogan's Islamic Turkey dream. You don't see PKK or it's legal party saying anything about it in Turkey, I think they mention it only when they are talking to western media :)
In Turkey, there is secular opposition which is rougly %40-50, they stand against Erdogan's Islamic push but they still lack of %50 + 1 votes to dethrone Erdogan unfortunately.
PKK says they want federalism for Kurdish cities, you can advocate for that, it's okay, their legal party is doing that, that's fine. But when you're holding guns and saying my way or high way, that's a big no. So, if they really care about democratic, secular Turkey, they can put guns aside, get together with opposition in Turkey.
Which Kurdish nation? The one that terrorists want? Even Turkey's Minister of Economy, as well as the Undersecretary of the National Intelligence Organization of Turkey, are of Kurdish origin. Millions of Kurdish-origin Turkish citizens have been living in peace and harmony for centuries. The PKK/YPG is a terrorist organization aiming to disrupt the harmony between Kurds and Turks for their own political and financial purposes, and your tone of speech closely resembles theirs
YPG has strong ties to PKK, which is recognized as a terrorist organization by NATO and EU [1] [2].
I strongly dislike Erdogan and his policies, and certainly don't approve the attack but YPG is a different issue. It is sad that most outsiders' view about the Kurdish conflict boils down to 'Turkey hates Kurds'. It's just not like that. We should all unite against terrorism.
The kill ratio is roughly 5 Kurds for each Turkish death. The cost to turkey has been hundreds of billions of dollars too. The reports from international human rights organisations like Amnesty International are grim. Turkey is using murder and torture systematically. While what I can see likely has bias, if you are in Turkey it is far harder and possibly dangerous to get good information due to state censorship and oppression.
Almost any other way of handling this situation would be better, but I haven’t the faintest idea what the average Turkish citizen could do to help this.
Being on the side of Turkey in the Syria conflict cannot be the right side of history. Especially because they are now in control of Kurdish occupied lands in Syria. Saying that the Turkish government harbors a century-long paranoid animosity toward the Kurds is the understatement of the year.
Turkey's government is just the big despotic fish in the small geopolitical pool that is the Caucasus / Northwest Middle East. Finding cheap ways to kill is not a defensive strategy for the gov't.
This is pure nonsense. Are you kidding me ? do you have any idea what you are talking about ?
Even Iraqi Kurds trying to ban PKK because they know what's going on in that organization. Even Kurds in turkey are not happy with PKK. They want a reform , but most of them wants stay in turkey, while the "being Turkish citizen definition changed".Look at how popular HDP is in Kurdish areas in Turkey.
You have no clue what are you talking about.
for further reference , please read/listen to Henri Barkey from Woodrow Wilson which is well respected political scientist.
The Kurdish-Turkish dynamic is interesting given that the biggest supporter of Kurdish independence in Iraq is Turkey. Not only politically, but by enabling things like financial independence through the Kirkuk-Ceyhan oil pipeline for the KRG to transport and sell oil outside of Iraq's SOMO.
I understand that Turkish Kurds lean towards the HDP/PKK, which is independent from the KDP/Peshmerga that the Turkish government supports in Iraq, but it's still interesting to try to figure out what Turkey's end goal is after all of this.
Everyone in Turkey knows that who/what that party is associated to and supports. They run under PKK executives' commands and that is nowhere near ok and cannot be justifiable by saying they are elected. They knew what they were doing was illegal and kept doing it and now these are the consequences.
We have been supporting the Kurds, yes - but our support is schizophrenic at best.
Though the Kurds are almost everything the US could want in a mideast ally - moderate, self-sustaining and stable, demonstrably capable - we will probably never embrace them fully due to our relationship with Turkey.
Some backstory:
Turkey lists the PKK as a terrorist organization, as Ankara and PKK have been fighting a separatist conflict for decades. Though the PKK has never targeted Americans, the US still lists the PKK as a terror org to placate Ankara.
The US has invested in Turkey as a strategic regional ally since the Cold War. Geographically Turkey was a key bulwark against Soviet power, and indeed we housed nuclear missiles within Turkish territory for many years. Even after the USSR collapsed, Turkey's regional value to the United States has grown. Incirlik is one of the largest air bases in the world, and remains a key logistical point for our military action in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Turkey was also important to the US ideologically because they were a stable, moderate, secular Muslim state, e.g. the kind of country we wanted to serve as a template for the rest of the Middle East. Thanks to Erdogan, this value has decreased sharply thanks to his moves to consolidate autocratic power at the expense of the still largely secular and moderate Turkish populace.
(Tried to keep the value judgements out of that, sorry if I offended someone by summarizing too generally).
One of the first ones on the list from 1992 had an interesting backstory that's still relevant today:
The Turkish government assassinated two journalists [1] [2] for uncovering the fact the Turkish gov (or likely intel agencies) were financially supporting and training Turkish Hezbollah terrorists in their special forces offices. Why? These Hezbollah guys were being used as irregular warfare militia to kill marxist PKK (they killed 500 PPK members), in between their normal terrorist activity of killing regular citizens for being secular.
Then in February 2019 [3] the government decided to let all 100 of them out of prison on some questionable legal grounds (that the old court who sentenced them was Gulen-connected). But when PKK fighters sent to jail by the same court tried to appeal, on the exact same legal grounds, they were rejected. So essentially the current Erdogan gov's policy is to openly support one terrorist group over others.
This is a classic example of Middle Eastern authoritarian regimes at work, where each one secretly support any number of sectarian groups when it suits their interests, while they ignore any tangental atrocities. Which was the waters Americans/Russians both attempted to wade into and saw it backfire multiple times.
I find Turkey and its government are behaving like an authoritarian regime, much alike Saudi Arabia. I don't understand how invading another country's territory is accepted in 2019. On the other side, the Kurds have lost thousands to fight ISIS (on the behalf of the West), have strong equality men/women etc. We should support the Kurds and cut connections to Turkey
Thanks Mr. Government supporting PR account. People ilke you are the main reason we are ashamed of and hopeless about our own country.
And if you are serious, definitely we are not living in the same country. I envy you.
BTW, Islamist does not mean Muslim. It's a political ideology. And it's not a democratic one. Erdogan is definitely an Islamist politician.
Edit: And Kurdish politicians and their leader are not terrorists at all. They have never been considered as terrorists since today. Only reason they are on target now is because Erdogan is obsessed with changing the regime and becoming the president while Kurdish party hinders that. The truth in Turkey is as simple as this.
Considering YPG is considered a terrorist organization and is an extension of another terrorist organization recognized by many countries, including US, I'm not sure this is about the ruler of the country.
YPG/PKK terrorism is something Turkey is trying to deal with for ~30 years now.
Calling people killing Turkish citizens as Kurdish minorities is also overly romantic if it's unintentional.
It's becoming a ritual with Erdogan's govt recently to launch airstrikes against PKK positions in Qandil, Northern Iraq following every terrorist attack in Turkey that's blamed on militant Kurdish nationalists and they even sent troops to Iraqi Kurdistan last December with the tacit approval of the Kurdish authorities to neutralize PKK militants there.
There's always been tension between Kurdish nationalist factions and they even had a brief civil war[1] between Iraqi Kurds in the 90s (Talabani vs Barzani) and there's rivalry between the Peshmerga and the PKK esp. in the area where the Peshmerga deems its territories in Iraq where some PKK members challenge their authority there but despite all of this, some Kurdish nationalist love to portray the conflict between Turkey and the Kurds as an ethnic and not a political one as it garners more support and sympathy for their cause and make Turkey look like the bad guy in this conflict.
The list you've linked doesn't contain the YPG, only the PKK. While the authoritarian in Ankara and people sympathetic to his goals like to conflate both, they are not the same, which is why the US supports one and has the other on the list.
Since I see that some friends have got excited about the recent events in Turkey I decided to write something about it and provide some context. I think it is good to know a bit of history of Turkey before AKP to understand what is going on there. It has been more than 10 years that AKP is in power so people might not know or may have forgotten the situation before AKP.
Turkey was ruled by ultra-nationalist ultra-secular militarist groups for decades. The military overthrow several elected governments and jailed politicians. Torture, extra-judicial killings, suppression, and corruption were widespread. The laws that people often object to are from that area and the constitution written by Turkish military, including insulting Turkishness being a crime. These groups who are sometimes referred to as Kemalists had the control of military, judicatory, academia, media, etc. Yet, they couldn't tolerate even the government being in the hands of people they didn't like. The large majority of Turks who are practicing Muslims were excluded. It was illegal to wear a head-scarf in universities and government departments in a country where over 70% of women wears head-scarf. Essentially these women were banned from attending university. Public officials and even university professors would be thrown out and even jailed if they showed any sign of nonsecular tendency. Writers and intellects were jailed for expressing opinions against Kemalist ideology. Erdogan, the current prime minister was jailed and banned from politics for 10 years for reading an old poem while he was the mayor of Istanbul. The existence of Kurds who are around 20 percent of Turkey's population were completely denied (not a joke)! Speaking or reading in Kurdish was banned and the popular Turkish singer Ahmad Kaya was forced to exile for saying that he will record an album in Kurdish. Popular political parties were closed regularly even when they won elections decisively. The news of corruption in police and politics was a regular daily routine as was the news of human rights violations.
In the years before AKP there were several short-lived governments by parties both on the left and on the right. Inflation was very high (hyperinflation), unemployment was high, governments were unstable. The value of Turkish lira dropped to a third in one night. Nightly interest rates tripled to completely ridiculous amount of 139%. You can look at Greece these days to have an idea of Turkey of that time. Turkish foreign policy was essentially dictated by the US government. There was a very harsh IMF imposed economic program so Turkey could pay its debts and a technocrat from world bank was imposed as the economy minister on the Turkish government to make sure they will implement what IMF wanted. The government and the country were in such a bad shape that it is almost unimaginable today after 12 years of AKP.
AKP was formed at that time. Erdogan was still under the ban from politics as well as many prominent politicians from his previous party. But some other politicians from the party were not under the ban. They created a new party: AKP (Justice and Development Party). Its members were moderate and pragmatist politicians from the banned party plus several other pragmatist and moderates from other right of the center parties. The current Turkish President Gul became the head of the party though Erdogan was significantly involved behind the senses. The party won a landslide election and has been continuously doing so for over a decade, increasing its share of votes in every election. You have to know that the length of Turkish governments before AKP to get a feeling of its significance: a few months!
Over a decade AKP has modernized Turkey, removed many of the laws that EU objected to, fought corruption in police and politics, improved the economy to its current amazing state, forced military out of politics, ... Until Syrian crises it had perfect relations with its neighbors. It followed what I would consider an awesome independent foreign policy. It is trying to find a political solution to the Kurdish "problem" and the right of Kurds have improved significantly under AKP. The list of AKP's achievements can go on.
So what is the problem? The problem is that the support base of AKP is not the western oriented seculars, it is the conservative majority who didn't have a voice in politics for decades (the silent majority) as the Kemalist and what Turks call "Deep Government" didn't allow the political parties supported by them. In all elections AKP has lost in the touristic Mediterranean coastal cities and European parts. You can find the map of the last general election results here:
Yellow is AKP, red is CHP, and light green is MHP. The south eastern parts are Kurdish areas where independent Kurdish politicians won.
The protests that you see these days are by this secular minority who has been voting for CHP (around 25%, significant, but still a minority).
Now, what are these alternative parties?
MHP is an ultra-nationalist racist conservative far-right party. Look up Wikipedia if you want to know more about them.
CHP is the party of the founder of the Turkey, ruled Turkey for decades in a one-party system, is a Kemalist party. It had strong relations with Turkish military, right now it is essentially the party supported by the elite who ruled Turkey before AKP and their supporters. The elite tried to topple AKP government undemocratically. Try to see if they objected to continuous serious violations of human rights before AKP.
Obviously I don't agree with everything that AKP and Erdogan do. However, AKP (and Erdogan) is definitely the best thing that has happened to Turkey over many decades, and Turks know it. That is the reason AKP keeps increasing its share of vote in elections. They are creating a strong developed democratic lawful independent Turkey. When you hear about protests in Turkey against AKP and Erdogan being authoritarian it is good to remember this context.
One final thing: AKP is often criticized for ignoring secular Turkish citizens who have not voted for AKP. Watch Erdogan's victory speech after winning the last election in which AKP further increased its share of votes. His attitude was completely humble and reconciliatory.
The problem, in my humble opinion, is not Erdogan and AKP being arrogant and authoritarian, but rather the secular minority demanding more than their fair share. I mean they objected to the removal of the ban on head-scarves for students attending university and consider it Islamization of Turkey (a country where over 70% of women wears head-scarf).
There have been more Kurds served in the Turkish Army than all the other armed organizations combined.
Majority of Kurds in Turkey openly support the Turkish Government, especially against the PKK terror.
Several Kurdish organizations in Iraq, Syria, and Iran support the Turkish Government, especially against the PKK terror.
PKK kills Kurds. PKK kills Turks. PKK will happily kill you if doing so benefits the crime and propaganda business they have been profiting for decades.
Let's not parrot some politically charged material as facts without having any actual understanding about such sensitive matter.
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