The empire is dead, long live the empire
Over at BBC reporter Mark Mardell's blog entry Religion and Politics, Turkish reader Leyla said:
Kurds only suffer so much because they refuse to accept that they are in a country that has the legal language of Turkish which they refuse to learn. How would the Enlish (sic.) like it if the Welsh, Scottish and Irish refused to learn English?
Ms. Leyla, I'd like to remind you that in Turkey it used to be illegal for the Kurds to have schooling in their own language, and bus drivers have been jailed for playing Kurdish pop while at work.
This is not an isolated incident -- witness the comments previously left by Turks in his Deep in Kurdistan entry. For example, from Metin we have this gem:
If you want to follow the elections in Turkey, why did you go to southeast? What do you expect to find there? Also there is no Kurdish territory in Turkey. I have never heard of a Mexican territory in the USA even though there are lots of latinos in southern states, which make up the majority in some cities and towns. Have you?
The Kurds have lived in the south-east of Turkey for thousands of years (even though in the past they were nomadic and as such some of the cities *were* indeed Turkish). The proper analogy is actually with Basque territories in France and Spain. Nationalist Spaniards might take issue with the use of the term Basque territory but a lot of Spaniards won't, even though the Basques, like the Turkish Kurds, have engaged in separatist terror campaigns.
The majority ethnicity in so-called nation states tend to oppress their ethnic minorities as de Tocqueville warned when he coined the phrase tyranny of the majority. Even the Russian and Chinese pay lip service to having Special Autonomous Regions for their ethnic minorities (Tatarstan, Karelians, etc. in Russia; Tibet, Inner Mongolia, etc. in China). But mention the g-word to a Turk or the s-word (self-determination, separatism) to nationalist Indonesians and ooh you're so in trouble. Nationalism is the new colonialism. The empire is dead, long live the empire!
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There are exceptions, arising mostly from break-ups of communist polities (Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia). For the ones left behind after the first World War -- the Kurds, the Assyrians, not to mention those stuck in most ethnically incongruous African countries, this frozen-bottled nationalism means they are at the mercy of those who came out of the colonial-imperial musical chairs on top.