What is the status of the Kurds in Turkey today?
The Kurds remain one of the world’s largest stateless peoples, and they make up somewhere between a quarter and a third of Turkey’s population. At one point it was illegal to call yourself a Kurd or to speak a word of Kurdish in Turkey – which meant for thousands of rural Kurdish women, who only knew their own language, it was illegal to speak. During its brutal suppression of the PKK insurgency, the Turkish military burned more than 3,000 Kurdish villages to the ground, leaving hundreds of thousands of people homeless and penniless. The worst excesses are now a thing of the past – largely thanks to Turkey’s ambition to join the European Union. The EU has made it clear Turkey will have to give the Kurds minority rights as part of the price of joining. But critics say the changes Turkey has made in its treatment of the Kurds to satisfy the EU have been little more than ‘cosmetic’. And it is clear from the resurgence of violence that there is still resentment at their treatment among Tur
