With 25 million members, the Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world without their own state. The Kurds have lived for thousands of years in a geographic area that is now part of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the former Soviet Union, sharing a similar language, religion and culture with these ethnic and national groups (Omestad, Kaplan, & Lovgren, 1999). Today, the 15 million or more Kurds living in Turkey constitute about 25 percent of that country's population; more significantly, however, the Kurds in Turkey, Iran and Iraq, have constituted a source of internal tension and have been a target for genocidal hostilities. For Turkey, the presence of a substantial population of Kurds with nationalist and separatist aspirations has fostered domestic dissent and international criticism.
After World War I, Kurds in Turkey and elsewhere in the region hoped to create a homeland from the disintegrated Ottoman Empire; however, the birth of the Turkish Republic in 1923 and the rule of Mustafa Kemal ("Ataturk") imposed a single identity on the multicultural population of Turkmans, Armenians, Assyrians, Kurds and others (Omestad, et al, 1999a). These groups were forcibly assimilated and everyone became a Turk, though for 25 years there were dozens of Kurdish uprisings. All were crushed, but antagonisms between Kurds and Turks continued; a Marxist-led group, the Kurdistan Workers Party or PKK, began an armed struggle against the government in 1984 that has continued to the present (McKiernan, 1999).
Graham-Brown (1999) has commented that in Iraq, government efforts to put an end to Kurdish nationalistic or separatist movements have resulted in thousands of deaths and the creation of a large population of Kurdish refugees -- many of whom, after Iraqi attacks in 1987/1988 and the Gulf War of 1991, have relocate to either Iran or Turkey. Iraqi Kurds have scattered to Iran or Turkey, where their reception and welcome has been chil...