The Guardian view on Turkey and the Kurds: putting peace at risk | The Guardian

Protesters in Brussels denounce
attacks on Kurds in Turkey and Iraq  

Friday 31 July 2015 - Turkey has ended its tentative reconciliation with the Kurds. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s political ambitions could be the key. | Ankara’s decision to throw away years of negotiations with the Kurdish nationalist movement in Turkey is both irresponsible and perverse. It seems likely to add to the dangers and uncertainties that the collapse of state authority in Syria and Iraq have brought to the wider region and it could have ominous implications for Turkey’s internal politics. Since the emergence of the modern state after the first world war, the relations between the ethnic Turkish majority and the Kurds, the country’s largest minority, have been the single largest problem faced by the country. Ankara originally tried to solve it by suppression and compulsory assimilation, hoping that in time Kurds would become indistinguishable from the rest of the population. The predictable result was resistance, in the early years in the form of sporadic revolts and, in the late 1970s, in the form of the Kurdistan Workers’ party, or PKK, an armed separatist movement.

How the Kurds' Power Play Backfired in Turkey | The National Interest

The HDP's attempt to refashion itself as the new, broad liberal force for Turks and Kurds might have done more harm than good.

Aliza Marcus,  Halil Karaveli - March 27, 2015

Imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan’s recent calls for the Kurdish militants to end the armed struggle inside Turkey seemed designed to show that they were on the brink of a peace deal. It didn’t work. The likelihood of a formal peace settlement has never been worse, and for now this may suit both the PKK and the Turkish government.

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, gambled that Ocalan’s announcement, first delivered by members of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) in a televised meeting with senior government officials, would give his party a boost before June national elections. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) has been negotiating with Ocalan since a ceasefire took hold in 2013 and has little to show for it. Turkish soldiers, who have been withdrawn to fortified bases outside city centers in the country’s Kurdish southeast, no longer carry out military operations, giving the PKK de facto control over the region.

Erdogan used to talk about striking a deal with the Kurds to give them broader rights. No longer.

Turkey's leaders see Kobani as opportunity, not threat, by Amberin Zaman | Al Monitor

Turkey's leaders see Kobani as opportunity, not threat | The fall of Kobani would deal a severe blow to Kurdish independence hopes and bolster Turkey's political goals. | Author Amberin Zaman Posted October 7, 2014

As Islamic State (IS) fighters keep up their battle to gain control over Kobani, a strategic Syrian Kurdish-controlled enclave on Turkey’s border, the effects of the conflict are being felt in Turkey itself. Thousands of Kurds took to the streets across the country on Oct. 7 to protest Turkey’s inaction against IS' seemingly unstoppable advance. The government slapped curfews on six provinces in the mainly Kurdish southeast region after clashes between protestors and the security forces, and between rival Kurdish groups, left at least 14 people dead. Elsewhere across the country, police clashed with demonstrators, trying to push them back with pressurized water and pepper spray while the Kurds responded with Molotov cocktails in a foretaste of the violence that is likely to engulf the country should Kobani fall.

Kurdish Response to Erdogan's latest "Presents"

Kurdistan Democratic Communities Union (KCK) | To the Kurdish Peoples and democratic public opinion

9 October 2013

The Kurdish question emerged as a result of the Turkish state's policy of Turkification through its denial of the Kurds' existence and subjecting them to cultural genocide. All the Kurds' objections to this policy have been violently crushed. Once the Kurds had been silenced and reduced to a state where they could not protest, the cultural genocide was accelerated using economic, social and cultural policies. By the 1970s the Kurds had been left with no option but to become Turkish in order to perpetuate their lives. A political, social, economic, cultural and psychological environment had been created that drove Kurds away from Kurdishness, putting it on the path to extinction.