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WHEN IN 1984 Turkey found itself faced with a series of armed attacks on rnilitary installations in the dominantiy Kurdish-populated rural southeast region, it immediately resolved on a traditional policy, to deal with these so-called "handful of bandits" in style, with weapons against weapons.
For Ankara officials and many Turks, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which launched the attacks, was nothing but "a remnant of the pre- 1980 terrorism" which had spread throughout this strategically important country in the form of violent urban activities in the late 1970s, constituting an excuse for the US-backed military takeover of September 12, 1980.
Turkey's enforced mono-ethnic identity was so well carved into millions of minds that no one even questioned the roots of the PKK, what this organization represented, whether its existence had legitimate social or political reasons, or whether the ethnic connotation in the name was anything other than a Marxist ploy to gain regional support.
Instead, both Turkish officials and western intelligence agencies preferred to treat the problem superficially, looking at it with the over-confident assumption that it was a "doomed terrorist group" from the very beginning and one which conspired to divide Turkey for "regional foreign interests."1
On the surface, every indication supported this view. The PKK's manpower was then low, ammunition and armament was scarce and the organization, confronting Turkey's enormous war machine, could clearly stay on its feet only with "outside" support - coming mainly from the regional countries attempting either to control their own Kurdish populations through promotion of crises elsewhere or indeed aiming to cripple NATO-member Turkey as the Cold War dragged on.
Yet, despite repeated assurances from officials that this terrorist group had been "dealt with," from only a 20-man urban-based passive student movement in the late 1970s, the PKK had already grown into a 300-strong trained militant force in the early 1980s.
This expansion actually reflected what was in store for the future. Its number increased several fold over the following years and by 1994, Turkish military officials estimated that its active supporters and sympathizers in the Turkish Southeast alone numbered more than 400,000,2 added to over half-a-million Kurds supporting the organization throughout Europe. If Turkey's current laws were fully applicable, this means that at least one million...