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| Volume XIII, Spring 2006, Number 1 |
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ABSTRACT
The Kurdish Question and Turkey's Justice and Development Party
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| M. Hakan Yavuz/Nihat Ali Özcan |
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Dr. Yavuz is an associate professor of political science at the University of Utah. His most recent book is titled: The Emergence of a New Turkey: Democracy and the AK Parti (University of Utah Press, 2006-in press). Dr. Özcan is the author of dozens of articles and scholarly works including The Origins and Policies of the PKK (Ankara: Asam, 1999). He has also co-authored an article in Foreign Affairs (January-February 2005) on the role of the Turkish military.1
After the defeat and consequent breakup of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, the European powers divided Turkey into several pieces. They also agreed, at the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920, to establish an independent Kurdistan a sort of homeland for the ethnic Kurds of the Middle East in what now is southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq. Although this treaty was never put into force, it shaped the perceptions of the founding fathers of the Turkish Republic regarding the largest non-Turkic ethnic population in its territory. Given that the Kurds, despite their aspirations, have never been granted a homeland and that this issue has caused a great deal of violence in the ensuing years, the Kurdish question has occupied both the domestic and foreign policy of Turkey to varying degrees for over eight decades.
1 The authors would like to thank Jason Alexander, Fahrettin Altun, Yasin Aktay, Edip A. Bekarolu, Payam Foroughi and Emrullah Uslu for their comments on different parts of this paper.
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