Turkish Politics & Internal Affairs

[Bismarck]

On 2.June, our house of representatives will decide if the mass murders on Armenians can be called as genozid.

 

[Zulkarneyn]

Anyone interested in the last decades of Ottoman Empire leading up to the first world war with Ittihat ve Terakki and how the orgnaizational capacity of the Young Turks, and the war of Independence of 1919-1922, and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's rule following the creation of the republic. The attempts starting from Abdulhamid's rule up till Ataturk's rule, and the legacy of Tanzimat and the first constitutional rule.

If you are just interested in Turkey's history, i strongly recommend this book
The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk's Turkey by Erik Zürcher
It's definately one of the best academic works on our history.
http://www.amazon.com/Young-Turk-Legacy-Nation-Building/dp/184885272X
@Deliorman you should definately have a look at this bro, im writing a master's thesis now, and this work is undoubtedly the most illuminating, its thoroughly researched in archives and other renowned academic works, up to date

 

[Successwill]

Interesting. I was reading an article comparing the two earlier today: link

"Indeed, at times they appear to be almost diametrically opposed: Israel has emerged as a diverse, dynamic, entrepreneurial, and productive Western nation with an open and engaged public debate, as well as a commitment to the preservation of basic freedoms. Turkey’s transition toward liberal democracy, on the other hand, is under threat. "

The author is serving for islamaphobia explicitly...He doesnt mention the "adjectives" of this country in question as the whole world knows

 

[Solomon2]

The author is serving for islamaphobia explicitly...He doesnt mention the "adjectives" of this country in question as the whole world knows

I don't understand you.

 

[Saleem]

I have a question for the Turks on this forum.....what are the issues between Erdogan-AKP and Gulen. PLease refrain from personal opinions and hypothesis---try to posting material form their official statements or those made by their senior officials -basically I am looking for where their opinions and positions on various issues differ as illustatrated by their statements and position papers etc......

 

[xenon54 out]

I have a question for the Turks on this forum.....what are the issues between Erdogan-AKP and Gulen. PLease refrain from personal opinions and hypothesis---try to posting material form their official statements or those made by their senior officials -basically I am looking for where their opinions and positions on various issues differ as illustatrated by their statements and position papers etc......

Noone really knows, everyone has his own theory, its only known that they broke with eachother somewhere around 2013.

 

[AUz]

I have a question for the Turks on this forum.....what are the issues between Erdogan-AKP and Gulen. PLease refrain from personal opinions and hypothesis---try to posting material form their official statements or those made by their senior officials -basically I am looking for where their opinions and positions on various issues differ as illustatrated by their statements and position papers etc......

May be its Erdogan's move to consolidate power.

Erdogan relied on Gulen to keep a hold on bureaucracy and deep state. However, this was his vulnerability. Once he achieved enough political power--he moved in to remove the "threat" of Gulenists and consolidate AKP's gains throughout the Turkish state by replacing Gulenists with AKP loyalists in bureaucracy, state institutions, police, security agencies, and so on.

Hopefully, after Erdogan is done AKPizing Turkish state--he reaches out to Gullen and make a new arrangement for cooperation where Gulenists can influence culture and life in Turkey--but aren't a political threat to AKP.

AKP-Gulen combo would be unbeatable then!

Turkish members are free to tell what they think of my assessment

 

[Timur]

For me gulen was the next ayatollah like person to set up of top of the turks.. If Erdogan would be a fail and a thread they would send the religious revolution to us.. But plan changed the Turkish version of arap spring was planned but did not work for now

Akp used gulenist movement to gain power.. Gulenist seem to be not really surprised they prepared themselves good.. But not enough..

I don't like the gulenist movement, I had some contact with their members but I can't say much about them it's difficult to look deeper into the organization

 

[-SINAN-]

I have a question for the Turks on this forum.....what are the issues between Erdogan-AKP and Gulen. PLease refrain from personal opinions and hypothesis---try to posting material form their official statements or those made by their senior officials -basically I am looking for where their opinions and positions on various issues differ as illustatrated by their statements and position papers etc......

Wiki page is quiet accurate; you can use google translate.

https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK_Parti-Gülen_Hareketi_çatışması

Don't look at the English page, it's not realistic and fictional.

 

[-SINAN-]

MHP announces snap congress after top court ruling

The Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) will hold an extraordinary congress in July, deputy leader Semih Yalçın announced on May 24, hours after Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals approved a local court’s decision for the MHP to hold a congress.

The court ruling only required the party to hold a congress to change its regulations, but MHP leader Bahçeli fired a swift counter salvo, with his deputy Yalçın announcing that the party would hold a congress to elect a new party leader.

Yalçın said the extraordinary congress will be held either on late June or early July, and Bahçeli will be seeking re-election.

Turkey’s top appeals court approved a local court’s ruling that allows the MHP to hold an extraordinary congress called by several hundred of its members to try to oust its veteran leader.

The 18th Civil Chamber of the Supreme Court of Appeals approved on May 24 an April 8 ruling by the Ankara 12nd Civil Court of Peace which was delivered upon appeals by dissident MHP members to force an extraordinary party congress and unseat long-time party leader Devlet Bahçeli.

“A decision to take the MHP to extraordinary congress, yet with an agenda for electing the party leader, has been taken,” MHP Deputy Chair Semih Yalçın said at a press conference held within hours after the top court released its decision.

The MHP was originally scheduled to hold its next party congress in March 2018.

Polls suggest the removal of Bahçeli could lead to a surge in support for the party, the fourth largest in parliament after the Nov. 1, 2015, snap elections in which the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) replaced it as the third largest party. According to polls, such a surge may weaken President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s chances of securing strong parliamentary support for the introduction of a full presidential system.

‘A dead well’

In the morning hours, addressing his party’s parliamentary group before the Supreme Court of Appeals announced its approval of the extraordinary congress decision, Bahçeli described the ruling party’s plans for a “presidential system” as “a deep well,” while underlining that they are vigilant of the “extreme costs” of both the presidential system and the highly touted “partisan president” model.

“As the Nationalist Movement Party, we are both prepared and determined to defend Turkey’s historical rights and interests, to eliminate deficiencies and to repair destruction,” Bahçeli said May 24.

“However, we have neither the will nor the appetite to drink water from the well, like the presidential system, the bottom of which is not seen,” Bahçeli said, addressing the parliamentary group of his party, referring to new Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım’s declaration of his commitment to boosting efforts to adopt a presidential system as part of the new constitution in line with Erdoğan’s desires.

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/mh...uling.aspx?pageID=238&nID=99606&NewsCatID=338

 

[باپ]

Turkey has been chasing EU membership for so long that it's boring now.
Why can't Turkey just forget about it?
No matter how secular Turkey becomes,that stamp of Islam will remain on Turks, and paranoid Europe will remain scared of Turkiye.
After all Turkey ruled them not long ago .

 

[Mucahit]

Turkey has been chasing EU membership for so long that it's boring now.
Why can't Turkey just forget about it?
No matter how secular Turkey becomes,that stamp of Islam will remain on Turks, and paranoid Europe will remain scared of Turkiye.
After all Turkey ruled them not long ago .

Turkish leaders know that we can't get in EU, so does the Turkish people.
Turkey is trying to accomplish what some baltic countries did.
We are currently seeking for more privilege with EU states.

 

[Solomon2]

Turkey’s demographic winter and Erdogan’s duplicity: Spengler
BY DAVID P. GOLDMAN on MAY 31, 2016

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan demanded that Turkish women abandon contraception in a televised address May 30, Reuters reported. “We will multiply our descendants. They talk about population planning, birth control. No Muslim family can have such an approach,” Erdogan said. The Turkish leader has denounced Turkish women for refusing to have more babies on many earlier occasions.


Turkish woman walks with umbrella in snow-covered Ankara

Erdogan has played every side of every issue, alternately courting and rejecting the European Union, claiming the United States as an ally against ISIS while aiding the terrorist army on the sly, succoring Hamas while proposing to rebuild relations with Israel, helping Iran run sanctions while claiming the Gulf States as Sunni allies. Christina Lin catalogued his double-dealings in a May 31 news analysis for this publication.

When he talks about Turkey’s failing demographics, though, Erdogan is speaking from the heart. Turkey’s Kurdish citizens continue to have three or four children while ethnic Turks have fewer than two. By the early 2040s, most of Turkey’s young people will come from Kurdish-speaking homes. The Kurdish-majority Southeast inevitably will break away. Erdogan’s hapless battle against the inevitable motivates the sometimes bewildering twists and turns of Turkish policy.

A review of the recently-released 2015 population data shows that the demographic scissors between Kurds and Turks continues to widen. Despite Erdogan’s exhortations on behalf of Turkish fertility, the baby bust in Turkish-majority provinces continues while Kurds sustain one of the world’s highest birth rates. Even worse, the marriage rate outside of the Kurdish Southeast of the country has collapsed, portending even lower fertility in the future.

According to Turkstat, the official statistics agencies, the Turkish provinces with the lowest fertility rates all cluster in the north and northwest of the country, where women on average have only 1.5 children. The southeastern provinces show fertility rates ranging between 3.2 and 4.2 children per female.



Even more alarming are Turkey’s marriage statistics as reported by Turkstat. Between 2001 and 2015, the number of marriages in Istanbul, the country’s largest city, fell by more than 30%, and by more than 40% in the capital Ankara. Most of the northern and northwestern provinces report a decline of more than half in the number of marriages. Not only are Turkish women refusing to have children; they are refusing to get married. The plunge in the marriage rate among ethnic Turks makes a further sharp decline in fertility inevitable.



As I reported in my 2011 book Why Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too), Muslim countries that achieve a high rate of adult literacy jump from infancy to senescence without passing through adulthood. Like their Iranian, Algerian and Tunisian counterparts, Turkish women reject the constraints of Muslim family life as soon as they obtain a high school education. The shock of sudden passage from traditional society into the modern world has produced the fastest-ever fall in fertility rates in the Muslim world.

Iran, whose fertility rate fell from 7 children per female in 1979 to less than 1.8 today, has the fastest-aging population of any country in the world. Turkey has an average total fertility rate of 2.18, or just at replacement, but the split between ethnic Turks and ethnic Kurds will make Turkey’s present geographic configuration untenable.

The Kurds’ courage and military prowess leave Turkey in a quandary. Any effective action against ISIS enhances the Kurds’ political standing and advances the day when they will have their own state including the northwest of Iraq and the southeast of Turkey, as well as the southwest corner of Iran and a large swath of northern Syria. But Turkey cannot abandon the NATO alliance, which stands as a guarantor of its territorial integrity. It has no choice but to play both sides, playing the public role of an alliance member while covertly sabotaging the effort to destroy ISIS.

That is the origin of the present refugee crisis.

From the start of the present refugee wave this summer, European security services have blamed Turkey for provoking the migration crisis. Last August the Daily Telegraph showed that Turkey’s electronic visa system allowed instant access to Turkey for migrants from 89 countries, as long as the travelers use Turkey’s national airlines. Migrants required no proof of identity to obtain a visa, and were subject to virtually on controls on arrival at Istanbul.

Whether Turkey opened its borders to boost the revenues of its national airlines, or planned to employ the migrants as a bargaining chip from the beginning, is unclear. But Turkey’s President Tayyip Recep Erdogan long since worked out that Turkey’s position as a valve in the great migration gives it enormous bargaining power with Berlin. In return for the promise of 6 billion Euros and visa-free travel in Europe for holders of Turkish passports, Erdogan has closed off the border to migrants—which implies that he might have done so a year ago when the migrant wave peaked.

Europe and the Gulf States, meanwhile, have stepped up their lending to the Turkish economy, which has incubated a consumer debt bubble worse than the 2008 subprime problem in the United States, I documented here on April 29. Erdogan’s popular support depends on the free flow of credit, especially in commercial construction and private housing. A financial reckoning would make his position untenable, and the Europeans and Sunni Gulf States are at pains to prop him up.

The West has chosen to give Erdogan all the slack he wants, which leaves the Levant and Mesopotamia in a state of permanent civil war. May 19 marked the centenary of the Sykes-Picot agreement under which France and Britain carved up the Middle East into spheres of influence, respectively controlling Syria and Iraq. The imperialists who imposed their maps on the Middle East did not have the welfare of the region in mind, but they did accomplish one important thing. They stabilized the region for nearly a century.

In a 2012 essay for Asia Times, I consulted the ghost of Cardinal Richelieu (metaphorically, of course) for an explanation of why Sykes-Picot had worked so well for so long. The Cardinal explained:

“It is a simple exercise in logique. You had two Ba’athist states, one in Iraq and one in Syria. Both were ruled by minorities. The Assad family came from the Alawite minority Syria and oppressed the Sunnis, while Saddam Hussein came from the Sunni minority in Iraq and oppressed the Shi’ites.

“It is a matter of calculation – what today you would call game theory. If you compose a state from antagonistic elements to begin with, the rulers must come from one of the minorities. All the minorities will then feel safe, and the majority knows that there is a limit to how badly a minority can oppress a majority. That is why the Ba’ath Party regimes in Iraq and Syria – tyrannies founded on the same principle – were mirror images of each other.”

“What happens if the majority rules?,” I asked.

“The moment you introduce majority rule in the tribal world,” the cardinal replied, “you destroy the natural equilibrium of oppression.

That is precisely what the Bush administration did in 2007 by foisting majority (that is, Shi’ite) rule upon Iraq. As Angelo Codevilla explained in these pages, the Sunnis responded by fighting to the death. Their rebellion against the Shi’ite majority was postponed by then-US commander Gen. David Petraeus, who hired them to be the “Sons of Iraq” and the “Sunni Awakening.” Without a permanent US occupation force, Iraq and Syria inevitably devolved into civil war.

Whether the continued oppression of majorities by minorities might have kept Syria and Iraq stable for another century is a matter of pure conjecture. The world of Sykes-Picot is forever gone and cannot be restored.

The only way to end the permanent civil war is on the model of the former Yugoslavia: create ethnic and confessional enclaves where Sunnis, Shi’ites, Christians, Kurds, Druze and others will be safe from those who wish to exterminate them. Devolution is simply the next-to-worst solution, but it is the only one that will reduce the pace of killing. And it would not affect the flow of economic migrants from Pakistan or sub-Saharan Africa. It would be messy, with a lot of population transfers, but it is a lot better than mass extermination.

There is, however, one insuperable obstacle to the creation of such enclaves, and that is Turkey. The first and most viable such enclave would be a Kurdish state. Turkey is violently opposed to a Kurdish State, which inevitably would carve off a large chunk of its own southeast.

Nonetheless, there has to be a fall guy, just like in the detective novel, and Turkey is the sole candidate for the position. A humanitarian solution in the region requires putting Turkey in its place. Instead, Washington and Berlin have given President Erdogan the wherewithal to strut and posture for some time to come. And that will keep the region at war indefinitely.

 

[Deliorman]

Just give them their independence before whole Turkey becomes a Kurdish state. That or just start making more babies and try to invite more Turks to come back from Western Europe.

 

[BordoEnes]

MHP announces snap congress after top court ruling

The Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) will hold an extraordinary congress in July, deputy leader Semih Yalçın announced on May 24, hours after Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals approved a local court’s decision for the MHP to hold a congress.

The court ruling only required the party to hold a congress to change its regulations, but MHP leader Bahçeli fired a swift counter salvo, with his deputy Yalçın announcing that the party would hold a congress to elect a new party leader.

Yalçın said the extraordinary congress will be held either on late June or early July, and Bahçeli will be seeking re-election.

Turkey’s top appeals court approved a local court’s ruling that allows the MHP to hold an extraordinary congress called by several hundred of its members to try to oust its veteran leader.

The 18th Civil Chamber of the Supreme Court of Appeals approved on May 24 an April 8 ruling by the Ankara 12nd Civil Court of Peace which was delivered upon appeals by dissident MHP members to force an extraordinary party congress and unseat long-time party leader Devlet Bahçeli.

“A decision to take the MHP to extraordinary congress, yet with an agenda for electing the party leader, has been taken,” MHP Deputy Chair Semih Yalçın said at a press conference held within hours after the top court released its decision.

The MHP was originally scheduled to hold its next party congress in March 2018.

Polls suggest the removal of Bahçeli could lead to a surge in support for the party, the fourth largest in parliament after the Nov. 1, 2015, snap elections in which the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) replaced it as the third largest party. According to polls, such a surge may weaken President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s chances of securing strong parliamentary support for the introduction of a full presidential system.

‘A dead well’

In the morning hours, addressing his party’s parliamentary group before the Supreme Court of Appeals announced its approval of the extraordinary congress decision, Bahçeli described the ruling party’s plans for a “presidential system” as “a deep well,” while underlining that they are vigilant of the “extreme costs” of both the presidential system and the highly touted “partisan president” model.

“As the Nationalist Movement Party, we are both prepared and determined to defend Turkey’s historical rights and interests, to eliminate deficiencies and to repair destruction,” Bahçeli said May 24.

“However, we have neither the will nor the appetite to drink water from the well, like the presidential system, the bottom of which is not seen,” Bahçeli said, addressing the parliamentary group of his party, referring to new Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım’s declaration of his commitment to boosting efforts to adopt a presidential system as part of the new constitution in line with Erdoğan’s desires.

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/mh...uling.aspx?pageID=238&nID=99606&NewsCatID=338

FINALLY

Turkey’s demographic winter and Erdogan’s duplicity: Spengler
BY DAVID P. GOLDMAN on MAY 31, 2016

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan demanded that Turkish women abandon contraception in a televised address May 30, Reuters reported. “We will multiply our descendants. They talk about population planning, birth control. No Muslim family can have such an approach,” Erdogan said. The Turkish leader has denounced Turkish women for refusing to have more babies on many earlier occasions.


Turkish woman walks with umbrella in snow-covered Ankara

Erdogan has played every side of every issue, alternately courting and rejecting the European Union, claiming the United States as an ally against ISIS while aiding the terrorist army on the sly, succoring Hamas while proposing to rebuild relations with Israel, helping Iran run sanctions while claiming the Gulf States as Sunni allies. Christina Lin catalogued his double-dealings in a May 31 news analysis for this publication.

When he talks about Turkey’s failing demographics, though, Erdogan is speaking from the heart. Turkey’s Kurdish citizens continue to have three or four children while ethnic Turks have fewer than two. By the early 2040s, most of Turkey’s young people will come from Kurdish-speaking homes. The Kurdish-majority Southeast inevitably will break away. Erdogan’s hapless battle against the inevitable motivates the sometimes bewildering twists and turns of Turkish policy.

A review of the recently-released 2015 population data shows that the demographic scissors between Kurds and Turks continues to widen. Despite Erdogan’s exhortations on behalf of Turkish fertility, the baby bust in Turkish-majority provinces continues while Kurds sustain one of the world’s highest birth rates. Even worse, the marriage rate outside of the Kurdish Southeast of the country has collapsed, portending even lower fertility in the future.

According to Turkstat, the official statistics agencies, the Turkish provinces with the lowest fertility rates all cluster in the north and northwest of the country, where women on average have only 1.5 children. The southeastern provinces show fertility rates ranging between 3.2 and 4.2 children per female.



Even more alarming are Turkey’s marriage statistics as reported by Turkstat. Between 2001 and 2015, the number of marriages in Istanbul, the country’s largest city, fell by more than 30%, and by more than 40% in the capital Ankara. Most of the northern and northwestern provinces report a decline of more than half in the number of marriages. Not only are Turkish women refusing to have children; they are refusing to get married. The plunge in the marriage rate among ethnic Turks makes a further sharp decline in fertility inevitable.



As I reported in my 2011 book Why Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too), Muslim countries that achieve a high rate of adult literacy jump from infancy to senescence without passing through adulthood. Like their Iranian, Algerian and Tunisian counterparts, Turkish women reject the constraints of Muslim family life as soon as they obtain a high school education. The shock of sudden passage from traditional society into the modern world has produced the fastest-ever fall in fertility rates in the Muslim world.

Iran, whose fertility rate fell from 7 children per female in 1979 to less than 1.8 today, has the fastest-aging population of any country in the world. Turkey has an average total fertility rate of 2.18, or just at replacement, but the split between ethnic Turks and ethnic Kurds will make Turkey’s present geographic configuration untenable.

The Kurds’ courage and military prowess leave Turkey in a quandary. Any effective action against ISIS enhances the Kurds’ political standing and advances the day when they will have their own state including the northwest of Iraq and the southeast of Turkey, as well as the southwest corner of Iran and a large swath of northern Syria. But Turkey cannot abandon the NATO alliance, which stands as a guarantor of its territorial integrity. It has no choice but to play both sides, playing the public role of an alliance member while covertly sabotaging the effort to destroy ISIS.

That is the origin of the present refugee crisis.

From the start of the present refugee wave this summer, European security services have blamed Turkey for provoking the migration crisis. Last August the Daily Telegraph showed that Turkey’s electronic visa system allowed instant access to Turkey for migrants from 89 countries, as long as the travelers use Turkey’s national airlines. Migrants required no proof of identity to obtain a visa, and were subject to virtually on controls on arrival at Istanbul.

Whether Turkey opened its borders to boost the revenues of its national airlines, or planned to employ the migrants as a bargaining chip from the beginning, is unclear. But Turkey’s President Tayyip Recep Erdogan long since worked out that Turkey’s position as a valve in the great migration gives it enormous bargaining power with Berlin. In return for the promise of 6 billion Euros and visa-free travel in Europe for holders of Turkish passports, Erdogan has closed off the border to migrants—which implies that he might have done so a year ago when the migrant wave peaked.

Europe and the Gulf States, meanwhile, have stepped up their lending to the Turkish economy, which has incubated a consumer debt bubble worse than the 2008 subprime problem in the United States, I documented here on April 29. Erdogan’s popular support depends on the free flow of credit, especially in commercial construction and private housing. A financial reckoning would make his position untenable, and the Europeans and Sunni Gulf States are at pains to prop him up.

The West has chosen to give Erdogan all the slack he wants, which leaves the Levant and Mesopotamia in a state of permanent civil war. May 19 marked the centenary of the Sykes-Picot agreement under which France and Britain carved up the Middle East into spheres of influence, respectively controlling Syria and Iraq. The imperialists who imposed their maps on the Middle East did not have the welfare of the region in mind, but they did accomplish one important thing. They stabilized the region for nearly a century.

In a 2012 essay for Asia Times, I consulted the ghost of Cardinal Richelieu (metaphorically, of course) for an explanation of why Sykes-Picot had worked so well for so long. The Cardinal explained:

“It is a simple exercise in logique. You had two Ba’athist states, one in Iraq and one in Syria. Both were ruled by minorities. The Assad family came from the Alawite minority Syria and oppressed the Sunnis, while Saddam Hussein came from the Sunni minority in Iraq and oppressed the Shi’ites.

“It is a matter of calculation – what today you would call game theory. If you compose a state from antagonistic elements to begin with, the rulers must come from one of the minorities. All the minorities will then feel safe, and the majority knows that there is a limit to how badly a minority can oppress a majority. That is why the Ba’ath Party regimes in Iraq and Syria – tyrannies founded on the same principle – were mirror images of each other.”

“What happens if the majority rules?,” I asked.

“The moment you introduce majority rule in the tribal world,” the cardinal replied, “you destroy the natural equilibrium of oppression.

That is precisely what the Bush administration did in 2007 by foisting majority (that is, Shi’ite) rule upon Iraq. As Angelo Codevilla explained in these pages, the Sunnis responded by fighting to the death. Their rebellion against the Shi’ite majority was postponed by then-US commander Gen. David Petraeus, who hired them to be the “Sons of Iraq” and the “Sunni Awakening.” Without a permanent US occupation force, Iraq and Syria inevitably devolved into civil war.

Whether the continued oppression of majorities by minorities might have kept Syria and Iraq stable for another century is a matter of pure conjecture. The world of Sykes-Picot is forever gone and cannot be restored.

The only way to end the permanent civil war is on the model of the former Yugoslavia: create ethnic and confessional enclaves where Sunnis, Shi’ites, Christians, Kurds, Druze and others will be safe from those who wish to exterminate them. Devolution is simply the next-to-worst solution, but it is the only one that will reduce the pace of killing. And it would not affect the flow of economic migrants from Pakistan or sub-Saharan Africa. It would be messy, with a lot of population transfers, but it is a lot better than mass extermination.

There is, however, one insuperable obstacle to the creation of such enclaves, and that is Turkey. The first and most viable such enclave would be a Kurdish state. Turkey is violently opposed to a Kurdish State, which inevitably would carve off a large chunk of its own southeast.

Nonetheless, there has to be a fall guy, just like in the detective novel, and Turkey is the sole candidate for the position. A humanitarian solution in the region requires putting Turkey in its place. Instead, Washington and Berlin have given President Erdogan the wherewithal to strut and posture for some time to come. And that will keep the region at war indefinitely.

BS article. Erdogan encourages both Kurds and Turks to breed like rabbits. For example when the average child per couple was around 3 in Diyarbakir, he encouraged the Kurds to raise the average to 4.

http://www.radikal.com.tr/politika/...cocuk-sayisini-arttirdi-en-az-4-tane-1161253/