There were already protests and some minor riots because the Kurdish people were angry that their PKK leader, Aubdullah Öcalan, had been moved into a smaller prison cell. But with this news, suddenly the riots escalated, and suddenly masses of people were rioting, throwing rocks through windows and at riot police.
A little background: Turkey began serious negotions to join the EU, back in 2005. While that is an entirely separate topic to address, some of the EU's social concerns about Turkey joining (at least the outwardly spoken ones) are Turkey's human rights issues: women's equality (which Turkey has made large strides in addressing), and its treatment of Armenians and Kurds in the country. I'm going to gloss over Armenia right now and focus quickly on the Kurds, for obvious reasons.
The Kurdish issue is a complicated one. Kurds are a separate ethnicity with their own Indo-European language, and comprise about 18% of the population in Turkey. Kurdish people live all over Turkey, but primarily in the southeast and eastern regions. Since 1930, when Turkey was founded, the Turkish government has created a lot of policies aimed at forced assimilation and Turkification of local Kurdish populations. For example, in the 1980 coup d'etat, the government banned Kurds from speaking their language in public. The ban was lifted in 1991, when a president was elected of partial Kurdish descent. However, Turkish remains the official language, the only one spoken in politics and public services. In 2003, the Turkish Parliament eased restrictions on Kurdish language rights in Turkey, yet Kurds are still largely banned from giving their children Kurdish names.
As a colleague carefully explained to me yesterday, Kurds feel that being Turkish is an ethnic and cultural heritage, not a nationality. They want to be recognized as Kurds living in Turkey, but they don't want to label themselves Turkish (it is a bit like if Jews had to give up calling themselves Jewish, and could only call themselves American, because calling themselves Jewish and speaking Hebrew would be forbidden.)
During the 1970's, the Kurdish separatist movement gave rise to a Marxist-Leninist party called the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK). Between 1984 and 1999, Turkey was engaged in a continuous conflict with the PKK. Human Rights Watch documented many cases where the Turkish government completely wiped out villages of local Kurds in an attempt to quell the PKK movement. During that period, an estimated 3,000 Turkish villages in Turkey were wiped from the map, displacing over 378,000 people (1).
All of this inner tension has continually resulted in constant riots and instability. Much of this began to change, however, when the current prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, promised Kurds equal rights and planned to relax previous restrictions. Erdogan has been praised for his recent attempts to peacefully address both the Armenian and Kurdish issues that Turkey faces. As one article wrote: "Last September, tens of thousands flooded the streets, holding flowers and 'celebrating brotherhood' with the Turks. Not a single stone was thrown. Not one angry word spoken."
Then a recent turn of events changed everything. The Turkish constitutional court ruled that the DTP, a party that many believe funds PKK terrorism in Turkey, should be banned because of it's alleged connection with the PKK. This resulted in further rioting on the streets, and a sense among Kurds that their voices are not being heard. Another political party was established in May (The Party for Peace and Democracy), when the members of the DTP discovered that their party would likely be banned. I'm not sure how they will be integrated into the government.
The question is: What's the right thing to do as Turkey moves forward? If they shut out the Kurdish political party, it seems that they'll create more opposition and more violence. But if they accept them--despite possible connections with a terrorist group--then they are essentially allowing a possibly violent faction to have an equal voice in politics. What is the best answer to achieving inner stability in the long term, while also acknowledging the rights of 20% of the nation's population? This is the question Turkey must wrestle with now--and fast--before this issue gets increasingly out of hand.
For more reading on this topic, check out a TIME magazine article here.
Or a recent news article about the riots here. (I don't like the patronizing tone of this article, but it has some decent history and explanations). The photo in this blog was taken from this article, and is of Protesters running from tear gas fired by riot police during a clash between Kurds and Turkish police in Diyarbakir on December 14, 2009.
(1): ^ "Still critical". Human Rights Watch. March 2005. p. 3. http://www.hrw.org/reports/2005/turkey0305/3.htm#_Toc97005223. Retrieved 2007-09-12.
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