Since the establishment of the modern state of Turkey it has been official Turkish policy, as Inonu said at the Turkish Assembly, to "Turkify the inhabitants of this land". A forced assimilation policy has been pursued by the Turkish regime since then. It is fine to say that there have been Turkish Presidents of Kurdish origin but as long as they deny their Kurdish background they are fine. As soon as they stand up and demand Kurdish human and political rights then the only place for them is the grave or jail. The PKK are only the latest in a long history of resistance to Turkish repression. The Turks burnt over 4,000 Kurdish villages, towns and hamlets in the nineties and continue to repress the Kurds. The majority of Kurds in Turkey support the PKK and the only solution is a political and diplomatic one. Journalists and commentators would be of much more use to turn their attention to find out the reasons why Turkey refuses any political offer of ceasefires and political solutions from the Kurdish side. There is no military solution but the Kurdish Freedom Movement is ready both for peace and war!
It’s Not About The West
Turkey is risking ties to the U.S. and Europe for a simple reason: its eyes are on the eastern front.
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Iraqi law stops at a small checkpoint at the base of the Qandil Mountains, 40 kilometers short of the Turkish border. The little post is manned by a handful of Iraqi Kurdish fighters loyal—officially, at least—to the government in Baghdad. Beyond, up an unpaved track, is a no-man's land controlled by outlaw groups of Kurdish guerrillas who have used the rugged tangle of peaks to launch attacks inside Turkey, which have left more than 95 Turkish troops dead this year alone.
But if Turkey has its way, Qandil won't be bandit country for much longer. While Washington has been promising to clean up Qandil for years, it has done nothing. So Ankara has taken matters into its own hands, send-
ing nearly 100,000 Turkish troops to the border area. Already, according to Turkish military sources not authorized to speak on the record, 11 Turkish battalions have been deployed on the Cudi, Kato, Gabar, Kupeli and Namaz mountains, surrounding Qandil in a ring of steel. Turkish F-16 jets have been flying bombing sorties up to 50 kilometers inside Iraq, and special mountain-fighting commandos have launched 300-strong raids at least 10 kilometers into Iraq. Turkey, it seems, is finally taking control of its eastern front.
But it's not just in Iraq. Along its eastern borders, Turkey is forging closer ties with its neighbors—reinventing relationships that date back to when Ottoman Turkey was the colonial master of much of the Middle East. And small wonder, considering what is happening on Turkey's western flank. In Brussels, Turkey has found its hopes of joining the European Union snubbed by Turko-skeptics like France's Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany's Angela Merkel, who have talked of a kind of second-rank "associate" membership instead.
At the same time, Ankara's old NATO ally the United States has—in Turkish eyes—not only destabilized its neighborhood with a reckless war in Iraq, but also failed to clean up the mess it has made by refusing to crack down on Kurdish guerrillas in Qandil. And while dozens of Turkish soldiers have died in Kurdish rebel ambushes, the U.S. Congress has been spending its time considering a resolution that would label the massacres of Ottoman Armenians a "genocide," one of the most controversial episodes in modern Turkish history. "Turkey will not move away from the West by its choice," says Ahmet Davutoglu, chief foreign-policy adviser to Turkey's prime minister. "But if Western countries continue to make the same mistakes, Turkey has other alternatives."
Given these wobbling relations with the West, it is perfectly logical for Ankara to start looking east. While the United States may view Iran and Syria as rogue states run by tin-pot dictators, to the Turks they're major regional players with established governments and, indeed, civilizations they have been doing business with for centuries.
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