Turkey’s Kurdish population mistreated

Today Turkey is a modern republic with a president and parliament, albeit one with overpowering military generals that often call the political shots. Turkey enjoys a huge tourist trade, as it is gifted with 5200 miles of temperate coastline. Since the land has been home to dozens of civilizations and peoples long past, there are myriad age-old monuments and historic sights, though many, if not most, were around long before Turks populated the area en masse.
When compared to its southern and southeastern neighbors, which are predominantly Muslim nations, Turkey serves as a much-heralded model of modernity combined with moderate Islamic values. Since Turkey founder Ataturk outlawed Islamic headgear and garb in public buildings back in 1926, Turkey has shunned Islamic fundamentalist traditions. It has been recently touted as a model nation for its troubled Arab Muslim neighbor nations to the south and the problematic Islamic theocracy of Iran to its east.
Troublingly, though, Turkey is still laden with some deep-rooted problems that, if not addressed, will make it even harder to achieve the E.U. membership that it wants so badly, and more importantly, will keep Turkey from realizing its full potential as a player on the world stage. First and foremost is the issue of the Kurds. Recently reported in the Los Angeles Times ("Nameless Kurds of Turkey," Jan. 30), Kurds in Turkey are not allowed to speak their language in public, teach the language at all or name their children Kurdish names, among countless other absurd restrictions. Failure to comply can yield horrid consequences, including long prison terms, torture and even execution. The government’s current policy toward its large Kurdish minority seems to be to completely and forcibly homogenize them into greater Turkish society, as previous Turkish governments have successfully done with Turkey’s large Christian minorities during World War I. Does the European Union really want as a member a nation and government that, among other ills, completely represses its Kurds?
It is no coincidence that Turkey’s government continues to repress and restrict its last large minority. Before World War I, dozens of ethnic groups called what is currently Turkey home. Among them were large contingencies of Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians. Today, fewer than 100,000 total from those groups remain in Turkey. The Turkish government spends millions of dollars each year on a campaign to defame and deny the Armenian genocide of World War I at the hands of the Ottoman Turk government, in which nearly two million Armenians and tens of thousands of Greeks and Assyrians were massacred.

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Editorial writer Shant Minas is a graduate student in mathematical finance. To comment on this article, call (213) 740-5665 or e-mail [email protected].