Turkey’s Interlocking Kurdish Quagmires:Roads to Nowhere?

• 作者: William Henry Park
• 来源期刊: 土耳其研究
• 学科: 政治法律
• 关键词: Kurdish QUESTION NATIONALISM NATION Building SELF-DETERMINATION
• 年，卷（期）: teqyj_2018,（1）
• 页码范围: 142-166
• 页数: 25页
• 分类号: D737.4

摘要

Turkey’s approximately fifteen million Kurds constitute up to twenty percent of the country’s population and account for about one half of all Kurds.Iraq’s roughly four and a half million Kurds constitute around fifteen percent of the total Iraqi population. Iran’s Kurdish population is probably a little larger than Iraq’s although a smaller percentage of the Iranian national total, while Syria is home to in excess of one million ethnic Kurds. Although it might be said that'the Kurds only really began to think of themselves as an ethnic community from1918 onwards…for Kurdish nationalists there can be no question that the nation has existed since time immemorial, long asleep but finally aroused'(McDowell1997:4). In other words, the rise of a wider Kurdish national consciousness roughly coincided with the incorporation of Kurds into the newly created states of Turkey, Iraq and Syria. Unsurprisingly therefore, the twentieth century witnessed frequent Kurdish revolts against Turkish, Iranian and Arab attempts at nation building and assimilation and in support of the self determination that had been denied them, and these have continued up to the present day. In short, the Kurdish’question’has been a transborder one since the collapse of the Ottoman empire at the end of the First World War, and is rooted in the global phenomena of decolonization, state creation, nation building, and the emergence of the principle of national self-determination.