An article by Bill Park, with aspects my media watching had not spotted, e.g.:
..more than 600 Kurdish prisoners are entering the eighth week of a hunger-strike...
Then there is the political decision to:
The vigorous crackdown on even relatively moderate Kurdish leaders removes the most likely interlocutors from the political scene, and surely serves to harden Kurdish sentiment
Demography could alter the scene, my emphasis:
More compelling is the recent estimate by the Turkish statistical institute that there are over 22 million Kurds in Turkey, constituting more than 30% of the republic’s population. Furthermore, the Kurdish birthrate in Turkey is reckoned to be at least twice that of ethnic Turks. Although these figures are fuzzy around the edges, they suggest that within a couple of generations, Kurds could well make up the majority of Turkey’s population. True, many are already assimilated; but can the government really believe that the current campaign of political repression and marginalisation, and violence rather than dialogue, stands any chance of assimilating the remainder of them - ever, let alone before such time as Kurds outnumber Turks?
Link:http://www.opendemocracy.net/bill-pa...king-to-crisis