by NICOLA MIRENZI
Last week Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan officially announced that the Kurdish language can at last be taught in all schools, acknowledging to the large minority living in Turkey a right so far always denied and feared by the republic, as if it were a mortal threat to national unity. The positive reaction from public opinion and from the press, with the exception of newspapers such as Cumhuriyet, whose secularist line strongly follows the principles of Kemalism, proves that in the country and in Turkish society the times are ripe for moving forward towards a resolution of the “Kurdish issue”, opening up to diversity and not denying it as has always happened so far.
Both conservative newspapers such as the Star and liberal ones such as Radikal supported Erdogan’s initiative, warning however that this right to have Kurdish language courses cannot be perceived as the beginning of a process that will result in the creation of an ethnic states within the Turkish Republic, but rather that it should be seen as a sign of Turkey’s own democratisation.
The news, announced by Erdogan, was known in political circles thanks to a very important agreement signed between the party currently governing Turkey, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the largest opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP). The news within the news was that the initiative for this agreement, addressed at creating a parliamentary commission entrusted with drafting a road map for resolving the so-called Kurdish issue (on the backdrop of the process leading to the drafting of a new Turkish constitution), had come from the party that is traditionally the most Kemalist and nationalist, the Republican People’s Party, founded personally by the “Father of all Turks”, Kemal Ataturk.
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