2008_10_SRP_CornellKaraveli_Turkey

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38 Svante E. Cornell and Halil Magnus Karaveli Figure 2: Fertility rates, 1993 and 2003. 25 Turks Kurds Total Total Fertility 2,25 4,57 2,74 Rate, 1993 Total Fertility 1,88 4,07 2,23 Rate, 2003 Demographically, the Kurds stand out not only through their size, but because of their diverging demographic pattern: their fertility rates are more than double that of the Turkish population on average. As figure one indicates, Kurdish women tend to have two more children, on average, than Turkish women – the latter already at under the replacement rate. While Kurdish fertility rates are likely to decline in the long term as well, this clearly indicates that the population of Turkey will shift somewhat in coming decades, with the Kurdish population growing in both absolute and relative terms, moving from constituting slightly over one in eight at present to one in six around 2030. Together with ongoing political developments in the region, this suggests that the Kurdish issue is unlikely to diminish in importance. The PKK’s Domination of Kurdish Nationalism Kurdish separatism and the terrorism of the PKK are by no means synonymous phenomena. While Kurdish separatism is a force that the republic has been forced to deal with since its inception, the PKK became its dominant representative only in the 1980s, when it hijacked the Kurdish cause into its very specific Marxist-Leninist rhetoric and an accompanying militant approach. Since then, despite ups and downs, the PKK has maintained a stranglehold on political expressions of Kurdishness in Turkey. As noted above, the Turkish nation-building experience has on the whole been a successful enterprise. Millions of people that do not have an ethnically Turkic background see themselves exclusively or primarily as Turks, notably an inclusively defined identity determined by citizenship, and not an exclusive one defined by blood. That includes many of the people of Kurdish 25 Source: Ismet Koç, Attila Hancıoğlu, and Alanur Cavlin, “Demographic Differentials and Demographic Integration of Turkish and Kurdish Populations in Turkey”, Population Research Policy Review, vol. 27 no. 3, p. 452.
Prospects for a ‘Torn’ Turkey 39 origin, primarily among those that migrated to the western areas of Turkey. Yet the Kurds remain the main failure in the Turkish nation-building project. Undeniably, the Turkish state failed to integrate or assimilate a large portion of the Kurds, especially those in the southeast. There are several reasons for this. The first and most obvious factor is demography: the Kurds are by far the largest non-Turkish speaking group in the country. A second reason is geography: the Kurds are traditionally settled in a defined area of the country, where they form a majority, and which is distant from the country’s administrative center, as well as inaccessible because of its topography. Thirdly, the Kurds differ from other large non-Turkic groups such as Slavs or Caucasians because they were an indigenous group and not comparatively recent migrants at the republic’s creation. Uprooted immigrant populations that suffered upheavals and hardships understandably proved significantly more willing to embrace a new national identity, compared to indigenous groups. Fourthly, the Kurds, unlike other populations, were organized according to a tribal and feudal social structure, a factor that remains crucial to this day in determining loyalties. Just as tribal populations elsewhere have proven difficult to integrate (Chechens and Pashtuns come to mind), the tribal system of the Kurds and its own hierarchies and loyalties proved harder for the Turkish state to integrate than other minorities. Finally, the Kurds have traditionally been a more fervently Islamic population, belonging to a more orthodox school of jurisprudence. Whereas Turks belong to the more liberal Hanafi school of Sunni Islam, Kurds are traditionally part of the more orthodox Shafi’i school, which, like the Hanbali school, practically excludes the exercise of private judgment and the interpretation of religious tenets according to circumstances of the modern day. These factors all combined to make the Kurdish question intractable. Paradoxically, the feudal structure of Kurdish society led attempts to integrate Kurds in the political system to backfire. Feudal leaders, of course, see the spread of education and economic development to their areas ambivalently at best, since it leads to the integration of the population with the rest of the country, and therefore to the dissolution of feudal structures of allegiance, in turn undermining the social position of the feudal leaders. Hence, when the Turkish republic sought to embrace Kurdish leaders, it was
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