Commentary: Turkey's Kurdish crisis is a crisis of democracy
by Baki Tezcan, Los Angeles Times
Oct 21, 2019
4 minutes
President Donald Trump is wrong. Kurds have not been natural enemies of Turks, fighting for hundreds of years. In fact, Kurdish lords were allied with the Ottoman rulers against Iran in the early 16th century, and that military and cultural connection stayed strong for centuries. Said Nursi, the most influential Muslim modernist thinker of Turkey, for example, was Kurdish.
Yet it's no secret that the history of Turkey in the 20th century is also a history of oppression of the Kurds. The creation of modern Turkey after World War I foreclosed a potential Kurdistan. Crucially, Turkish citizenship in the new republic, while not legally based on ethnicity,
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