Turkey: what is going on?

[davidbfpo]

A short commentary on the path taken by the Erdogan-led AKP government, including taking over this week an opposition newspaper:http://tahirabbas.co.uk/index.php/no-freedom-no-speech/

It ends with:

People in Turkey remember the dark days of the 1980s and 1990s, when ethnic and sectarian violence was the norm, with people sharply divided politically, culturally and economically, and when a dark and gloomy cloud hung over the nation without hope or opportunity. The irony is that half of the nation regards anything the ruling party does as perfectly acceptable in the current climate of actual terrorism in the form of far left violence, Islamic State bombings and the perennial bogeyman, the PKK, resurfacing as Turkey’s most sinister enemy within. With an immense electoral mandate, the AKP leadership sees itself as untouchable. Such hubris is often the pride before the fall.

[davidbfpo]

A short article after recent events:https://theconversation.com/bombing-...-turkey-56223?

Which concludes:

So brace for further attacks on Turkey’s major centres of population. The tragedy is that the more regular these become, the more polarised civil society will become in the country. The prospect of communal violence against minority Kurdish populations in parts of Turkey is growing more likely and an end to the conflict seems further away than ever.

[davidbfpo]

Via Twitter. This may explain some of the context for recent mayhem and murder in Turkey.

[davidbfpo]

A two part piece on Defence-in-Depth blog by Bill Park, a Kings War Studies academic, reviewing Turkey and the Kurds. The first part ends:

In fact, many Kurds are assimilated, but the Turkish state has never embraced or even truly grasped the fact that Kurds are at least as different from Turks as, say, Poles are from Germans or, if preferred, the Irish and Scots are from the English. There will be no settlement of Turkey’s Kurdish question until and unless Turks accept the ethnic, linguistic, cultural and historical distinctiveness of the twenty percent or so of Turkey’s citizens that are ethnically Kurdish rather than Turkish. There are few serious signs that this recognition is imminent.

Link:https://defenceindepth.co/2016/06/08...e-east-part-1/

The second part looks at the trans-border aspects and ends pessimistically that after one century of conflict, nothing has changed.
Link:https://defenceindepth.co/2016/06/13...e-east-part-2/