Understanding phases of Kurdish problem in Turkey

This year and the next few months are going to be critical regarding the future of Turkey’s critical Kurdish problem.

Both the government and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) are heading toward a make-it or break-it stage after the two-year-old exhausting dialogue in between the two.

In the bigger picture, President Tayyip Erdoğan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu want to give an end to this chronic problem that has claimed some 40,000 lives since the PKK launched its armed campaign in 1984. It has also been draining the country’s resources. Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek revealed during budget talks last month that the cost of the fight against the PKK was nearly 1 trillion Turkish Liras ($435 billion) for Turkey during that period.

And at a tactical level, the Erdoğan-Davutoğlu administration does not want Turkey to go to the parliamentary elections in June with the PKK’s de facto cease-fire broken. They cannot afford funerals of military and police officers during an election campaign where they aim for at least 50 percent to secure a constitutional change afterward. Knowing that, the PKK urges the government to have the legislative changes before the elections, with a threat to resume their armed campaign.

Saying that, for the first time the possibility of a political settlement for the Kurdish problem is so near in decades.

But what took the Turkish state so long to start talking about the Kurdish solution?

The answer is in the dynamics of power politics in this part of the world and the administrative traditions of the centuries-long Turkish state, whether it was sultanate or republic.

During an interview in the December 2014 issue of the Turkish history magazine “Atlas...

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