The Turkish Kurds: Erdoğan’s Folly On Full Display – OpEd |
By Alon Ben-Meir
Nearly a decade after Turkey’s failed coup attempt of July 2016, the country’s political landscape has been transformed beyond recognition. What began as a night of grave uncertainty for the Turkish state has become the long day of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s consolidation of power—an authoritarian restructuring that has reshaped institutions, narrowed civil liberties, and placed entire communities, particularly the Kurds, under intensified repression and persecution.
Perhaps nowhere has Erdoğan’s nationalist authoritarian turn been more devastating than in his treatment of Turkey’s Kurdish population.
In the early 2010s, Erdoğan surprised both domestic and international observers by launching a peace process with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). For the first time in decades, there appeared to be a genuine prospect of a negotiated solution to a deeply entrenched conflict. Kurdish language, culture, and political expression seemed poised to gain mainstream legitimacy.
That hope was short-lived. By 2015, the peace process collapsed—by Erdoğan’s own design.
What followed was a level of repression unmatched in the post-1980 period. The pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which emerged as a major parliamentary force in 2015, was relentlessly........