I%26#039;d like to know What you would do if the situation of your state would be different.
I mean a situation where Turkish people would be a minority and a Kurdistan state were existed instead of Turkey, and all of the policies of the %26quot;Kurdistan%26quot; toward the Turkish minority in that situation would be the same as the current policies of the %26quot;Turkey%26quot; toward the Kurdish minority, What would you do then?
Consider a situation where a law would applied to Turkish people through military control, boarding schools, the banning of the Turkish language and culture, changing place names, and deportation. What would you do then?
Consider a situation where Any expression of Turkish identity would be treated as a crime against the %26quot;indivisibility of the Kurdistan nation%26quot; and %26quot;territorial integrity%26quot; of Kurdistan.
What would you do then?
Consider a situation where The use of the Turkish language, music, dance, dress, personal and geographic names, and even listening to broadcasting and recorded music were all criminalized by the Kurdistan state.
What would you do then?
Consider a situation where Turks would be allowed to speak their own language in public aftre 70 years of banning.The use of Turkish in education, broadcasting and publishing would be prohibited. Anyone publishing, or attempting to publish, an objective historical analysis of the Turkish situation is subject to prosecution and imprisonment.
What would you do then?
Would you like that situation? Would you just sit back and do nothing against these actions?|||Your question is hypothetical although you have unsuccessfully tried to make a comparison of what Turkish Kurds are supposed to have gone through, many of what you have written down is simply not true. You have minced your words here but in another answer I saw, you claimed Kurds are imprisoned and tortured every year in Turkey, excuse me for asking but what have you been smoking? One of my best friends is Kurdish and she abhors the PKK and its fascist sympathisers, just like millions of other Kurds. I have written this numerous times before, and I ask you now, how would you explain the fact that the party that has the clear blessing of the PKK (BDP) never receives more than 10% of the votes?
What do you think about people belonging to BDP making provocative and threatening speeches, one MP from this party said %26quot;His people would turn the streets of Turkey to hell%26quot; (implying the PKK would start bombing urban targets, as it did only yesterday by planting a bomb on the way of a bus and killing 5 people). IF the Turkish government is brutal as you say, how come people like this MP find the audacity to make such statements in front of the TV cameras? How come people openly cheer for the PKK in rallies and get away with it? Imagine people gathering in New York and holding Osame Bin Laden posters and jumping up and down in joy. How would be the reaction of Americans?
So what do you expect me to say under this question which lacks insight and is written in a regrettably dramatic tone seasoned with outdated 19th century nationalism? When I read the question, I thought the details contained some analysis, since it asked for a rational answer and what I find here is a bad attempt at a logical fallacy.
Turkey has had problems with human rights, but that really has little to do with one%26#039;s ethnicity. Turks, Kurds and millions of other people, who come from tens of ethnicities (I hope you are aware that it isn%26#039;t just the Kurds who live in Turkey) have suffered from mistreatment.
I also find it exceedingly biased for people to ignore and deliberately brush aside the proceedings relating to the use of Kurdish language for instance. Our government established a Kurdish language channel for instance. There are other proceedings as well yet I always see that people such as the asker find exuberance in focussing on all the negative news concerning Turkey.
Lastly, Turkey is a democratic country and if people, be it Xs be it Ys or interest groups, feel they cannot exercise their rights as they should, they can find democratic means to express their concerns. Taking up arms, kidnapping 14 year old children and making them drug addicts so that they%26#039;ll fight for you is not a part of %26#039;democratic re/action%26#039; nor is killing civilians nor is killing your own soldiers.
@the answerer above:
I beg to differ. The only reason why Kurds are associated with manual labour is not because of any deliberate discriminatory practices regarding education and job hiring but because of Kurdish culture, which attributes, just like any other Middle Eastern culture, unfortunately, little importance to education and women%26#039;s rights, deplorable honour killings continue to be a problem in Turkey. Many of these rural Kurdish families prefer to make their children work on fields rather than sending them to school, if they feel they do not have enough money, they should avoid polygamy -which again is illegal in Turkey- and tens of children that comes with it! It is hard for the Turkish government or any other government to change the basic tenets of a very closed culture.
In addition to that, I am sure you are, as I am, aware that there are millions of very wealthy and influential people of Kurdish origin in Turkey, politicians, journalists, singers, business men...
There are poor villages in the Black Sea region, poor villages in Western Anatolia and poor regions in South-eastern Turkey. The latter%26#039;s situation may be worse due to the PKK%26#039;s dastardly attacks there, which continue to traumatize the lives of many ordinary citizens in the region and this has little to due with the ethnicity of people who live there. After all, it isn%26#039;t as if the whole of Eastern Turkey has only Turks of Kurdish origin! Millions of Turks and other groups of people live there.|||you deal w your own biz muthafucka,you think you have a strong imagination but its just those pils you re taking.
sit back and enjoy buttmunch.|||First of all, there is no Kurdistan.
Secondly, I think you need to learn the history of Turkey before you ask this question. It is not such simple. Do you know how many people died for Turkey in the Independence War, and people are still dying, not only soldiers and officers, but also their daughters,wives and local people. Recently, 4 soldiers and one of the soldiers%26#039; daughter have died. You may not be understand because every morning when you wake up, you don%26#039;t hear that more soldiers has died. Of course I don%26#039;t mean that we need to abuse all the Kurdish people. Turkey has made a mistake. Many Kurdish people work in fields and constructions, etc.(They do hard jobs, but their salaries are low). This is the only mistake that we do.
Thirdly, the terror organization is trying to divide the country.
Lastly, you say %26quot;would you like the situation?%26quot; Now I ask you: If your grandfathers fought for the independence of your country and there were still deaths for a land and if a group tried to divide the country, would you like the situation.
Please think again.
@The Sorceress,
First of all, I live in Eastern Turkey, and I didn%26#039;t mean that Eastern Turkey has only Kurdish people. For example, I%26#039;m a Caucasian Turk.
Secondly,I completely agree with you about the culture of Kurdish people. Unfortunately, they have some strict rules that cause honour killings. It shows that education is the biggest problem and also the most important solution of Turkey.
Lastly, I didn%26#039;t mean that all the Kurds are poor. Yes, there are many Kurdish people who are very rich, but there are 11 million Kurds in Turkey, and as you say they are not rich.
Before the party-called DTP- banned, the head of the party said that %26quot;Siz K眉rtlere ne verdiniz?%26quot;.
I want to continue my writing in Turkish,
Objektif de臒erlendirirsek, 莽ok da haks谋z say谋lmaz. Do臒ru, biz K眉rtlere 莽ok 艧ey vermedik. G眉ne艧in alt谋nda, bah莽elerde meyve toplayanlar谋n 莽o臒u K眉rt. 陌stanbul%26#039;a bakal谋m, 莽o臒u kapka莽莽谋, yan kesici K眉rt.(Elbette %26quot;b眉t眉n K眉rtler b枚yle%26quot; ya da %26quot;bunlar谋n aras谋nda T眉rk yoktur%26quot; demiyorum). Su莽 i艧leyenlerin, su莽 i艧lemek istedikleri i莽in su莽 i艧lediklerini zannetmiyorum.
Bu konu hakk谋nda yaz谋艧mak istiyorsan谋z e-mail yoluyla yaz谋艧谋rsak sevinirim.|||http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/ind鈥?/a>
I will just copy and paste my answer for the same question you%26#039;ve posted twice.
Kurds have exactly the same right as any other Turkish citizen in the REPUBLIC OF TURKEY, as they%26#039;re are also considered as a citizen of this country. Please be more reasonable and rational next time when you%26#039;re posting a question as such.
Consider this, if someone came to your house and said to you %26#039;get off that couch, it%26#039;s mine now, you can go sit in your bedroom from now on%26#039;, would you accept that? If every country gave land to every minority group within their borders, imagine what the world would come to.
you%26#039;re wrong by the way, there is a channel dedicated to Kurds, broadcasting in Kurdish, on which they can watch many programs and shows in Kurdish.
Turkish government sends them teachers, doctors, nurses and everything else they need, but (most of) those doctors, nurses, teachers are kidnapped and (most of the time) killed. So what rationality were you speaking about again?
About 5 minutes ago I was watching the news, watching the funerals of the young soldiers who were killed by the feral terrorists, of a young 17 year old girl who still had so many goals to achieve in this life. What was her fault? Would she even know the controversy of this topic at the innocent age of 17? So being reasonable you were talking about, right? The amazing thing is, when I saw the orphan daughter (at 2 years old) of the murdered soldier at the funeral, I couldn%26#039;t help but shed a few tears, while his proud dad was saying %26#039;Vatan sagolsun. 3 oglum ve ben variz daha, gerekirse vatan icin sehit olmaya.%26#039; - Long live the homeland. I still have myself and 3 sons to sacrifice for our homeland- So please, be reasonable and rational, put yourself in this man%26#039;s shoes for a few minutes, would you be able to say the same thing? Honestly and rationally, I would not.
Here you go. I gave you a very reasonable, honest and a rational answer.|||Years ago, a Turkish columnist (Altan) wrote an article in a major Turkish national newspaper, Hurriyet or Milliyet if I remember correctly, along the same lines. He created a hypothetical situation where Turks suffered from what Kurds had undergone over the 20th century. He was harassed widely and prosecuted by the authorities. I don%26#039;t remember the result of the prosecution, though.
This is a very delicate issue for Turkish citizens no matter what their ethnic backgrounds are, as you can discern from the answers given to your question. But it is not limited to the situation of Kurds in Turkey and elsewhere. National question is yet to be solved in global as well as local politics. Only recently, for instance, British PM Cameron acknowledge how British government terrorized the civilian Irish population along with IRA militants and fabricated fake evidence against them, and resorted to the method of extrajudicial punishment in its dealings with IRA militants and civilian people who are considered to be aiding and abetting to them or who doesn%26#039;t want to become a %26quot;tout%26quot;.
This was just an example and similar things happened also in Turkey. Kurds were openly discriminated against until the nineties; actually it was more than discrimination as they were not even considered an ethnic community. To its stupidity, the regime in Turkey called them %26quot;Mountainous Turks%26quot; and their language %26quot;Mountain Turkish%26quot;. Today, however, nobody believes in this. Even people who believed this in the past (at least most of them, I hope) are honorable enough to be embarrassed when reminded of this (I must recommend nobel prize winner Harold Pinter%26#039;s fascinating play called The Mountain Language).
Kurdish political prisoners, after the 1980 fascist coup instigated by the US secret services, were tortured in ways inconceivable by a normal human being for years. Both US involvement and tortures are now recognized and evidenced widely. And let me remind you that there was no Kurdish armed insurgency until 1984 when PKK started its armed struggle. Before 1980 even armed political groups of Kurdish origin considered themselves part of the Turkish revolutionary left. But the junta treated them much more harshly than it treated the Turkish left-wing people, although they were also subjected to widespread torture.
This doesn%26#039;t justify terrorism, I can hear people saying. And I agree it doesn%26#039;t. But a state itself, by definition, cannot and should not act like those who terrorize people and adopt the tactics of a terrorist organization. The number 40.000 is widely cited as the number of people died as a result of this conflict. But remember, 17.000 of these remain to be unsolved cases of murder. Villages were burned down, and emptied of its inhabitants. And all these are today recognized by the government. These people who suffered from the atrocities both by the state and the PKK, are being compensated for by the state now.
Never in history have good guys been on the one side, villains being on the other. The most disturbing thing for Turkish people when they interact with Westerners, however, is that they are singled out as the villain of history and this is unfair. Every power in history, when challenged by a lesser power, behaves in a way that may be unjustifiable in the modern sense of the word morality. Many examples can be cited: Guantanamo for the US, the French in Algeria and on its own soil against the minorities, Spain against left wing and liberal people until 1980s and against Basque and Catalan people, Britain against the Irish and many many other peoples in the world and its workers in late 1970s and early 1980s, Italy against the immigrants and southern italians, indonesia against the timorese, China against the tibetians and the uighur turks along with its peasantry, tutsis against hutus and hutus against tutsis in Rwanda...
One last note to some answerers: essentializing culture and attributing certain features to an ethnic group is ignorance, if not racism.
Most probably I will be condemned by people from both sides as this is a delicate issue as I mentioned above. And people don%26#039;t look at the facts when it%26#039;s delicate, rather they throw their pre-established opinions. I%26#039;d rather discuss the facts I presented, but it may not always be possible.
