The Kurdish question has certainly been one of the most important political problems of Turkey throughout the twentieth century. The evolution of the Kurdish question in Turkey has taken a different shape along the recent years. The conflict which had once started as independence aimed one, turned out to be a struggle for the recognition of the Kurdish minority’s rights and then territorial autonomy since the turn of the millennium. The Kurdish question and the ethnic struggle around it embrace many sub-questions such as why do the territorial minorities claim independence, what are the factors that push them to ask for more rights and freedom whereas they have been living in the same nation-state for centuries, what pulled the trigger for these populations to seek independence in the first place and why did they give up this goal and started solely to claim autonomy, what are the territorial and non territorial rights and how the Kurds are entitled to use them? While trying to give answers to these questions, this paper will also analyze the historical background of the Kurdish conflict in Turkey within the Cold War and post-Cold War frameworks as well as to understand the changing balances in the Middle East in the 2000s, the reasons which led the Kurds of Turkey to ask for “democratic autonomy” instead of independence and the Turkish reactions to these claims, highly taken prisoner to the paranoia of Sevres Treaty.
