The Kurdish Nationalist Movement in the 1990s: Its Impact on Turkey and the Middle East

The Kurds are the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East, numbering between twenty and twenty five million. Approximately fifteen million live in contiguous regions of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, an area that they call Kurdistan, yet they do not have a country of their own. Formal attempts to establish such a state were crushed by the larger and more powerful countries in the region after both world wars. But the Gulf war, the Iran-Iraq war, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the cold war have worked to reinvigorate a Kurdish nationalist movement. The movement is a powderkeg waiting to explode. With the majority of Kurds living within its borders, no country faces this threat more squarely than Turkey. And because of Turkey's concept of a unified, cohesive nationhood - in which the existence of ethnic minorities is not acknowledged - these tensions are more difficult to manage in Turkey than elsewhere.