The Kurds and the future of Turkey

by Michael M. Gunter

Since August 1984, Turkey has suffered from an increasingly virulent guerrilla/terrorist insurgency led by the Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan (PKK), or Kurdistan Workers Party, headed by Abdullah Ocalan. By the summer of 1996, more than 20,000 people had been killed and, by the admission of the Turkish government itself, another 2,000,000 internally displaced and more than 2,000 villages destroyed. At present, the Kurdish problem in Turkey threatens to challenge the very future of the country itself. In The Kurds and the Future of Turkey, Gunter looks at the way in which the current Turkish government is dealing with the problem, analyzes the role of what he calls the authoritarian tradition in Turkey, and puzzles over the seeming inability of Turkey to take the final steps toward becoming a genuine democracy. He focuses on the PKK and its longtime leader, traces the Kurdish struggle as it has developed in Turkey since the publication of his last work, and looks at the roles of Syria, Iraq