Quote Originally Posted by wm View Post
This could be a shrewd political move by Erdogan. Especially given that he and Gul are facing serious concerns about their Islamist tendencies and have already been warned that the Turkish army will enforce what it views as an appropriate separation of church and state. One way to deflect the people's attention is to get his countrymen refocused on those nasty Kurds who keep blowing up Turks.
Actually based on what I have read and heard from my one Turkish-American friend (rabidly anti-AK, former Turkish Army infantry officer) is that the anti-Kurdish push is largely the province of the secular nationalist officer corps. The AK Party is viewed by the officer corps as soft on Kurdish terrorism as part of their program to join the EU --- this is in line with the reforms AK has instituted regarding human rights. There were some initiatives which AK introduced in the southeast, for instance allowing Kurdish-language broadcasts, that were adamantly opposed and ultimately rolled back by the military in the late 1990s.

AK has largely sacrificed what pro-Kurdish tendencies it may have had since the Iraq War. The gains made by Iraqi Kurds and the military's increasing paranoia over this, as well as possibly related increasing militancy on the part of the PKK and the Kurdish terror groups, have put the kibosh on any possible Kurdish rights in Turkey. Suicide bombs going off in Ankara have a way of doing that, I suppose.

Of course whether the military is using the Kurdish issue as a way to regain its dominance over the government is also a major question, not least among Turks themselves.