Why not just give the Kurds the land east of the Euphrates or even just south of the Murat? Why not let them have their own country? Wouldn't you gain more than you would lose. They surely would join with Iraqi Kurdistan and all that oil. Wouldn't you become the good guy and Iran the bad? I know the PKK has committed a lot of violence but now it seems you have a possible partner in Barzani. Leadership that desperately needs you as a friend and ally rather than a target.
Honestly if Minnesota wanted to join Canada I really wouldn't care.
I'm really not trying to ruffle any feathers. I just would like to know what you guys think.
Politically speaking, it's probably the same reasons that Iran won't give anything to Azeri Turks. They are more there than Kurdish people are in Turkey.
I'm not much into this stuff btw, it's just too complicated for me. I try to stay away because racism/nationalism/ethnicism is nothing but very disruptive and it's sad for me to see our people(all Turkey citizens) are under heavy pressure by it being used as a provocative tool by both the internal and the external separatists, for the last 4-5 decades. PKK are not recognized as a terrorist group on a consensus by the whole world(some countries and NATO blacklist them as terrorists some don't), which is a great disgrace on the western world in my opinion because I don't know who are terrorists if they are not. Instead, they are greatly supported by particular western and mid east countries. So it's all politics for some countries and groups, while it means only horrible deaths for both Turkish and Kurdish people and their families.
In the western media for instance, they try their best to call them as Kurdish rebels, separatists, party workers or whatever they can find for not to call them terrorists. Sometimes they are even depicted almost as heroes who are getting killed by the Turkish army undeservedly while they are fighting for their freedom, on some western TVs.
The crucial point is, to know that they do not represent Kurdish people other than a non-significant part of them. Very few Kurdish people want to get divided. Today, a guy named Selahattin Demirtaş is one of the candidates for the Presidency Elections in August, he is supported by both of the Kurdish parties(BDP and HDP) and he clearly states that Kurdish people don't want to divide Turkey, they demand their rights which they were shorn of for decades. That's the biggest mistake in the history of the Republic of Turkey in my opinion. Turkish governments have caused so much suffering and injustice for the Kurdish people and that created the base and circumstances for PKK and some other terrorist groups to emerge. And the terror is the biggest mistake of the Kurdish side likewise, because after that point it's just a vicious circle. Even though the majority of the Kurdish people didn't support the PKK, they didn't exclude, denounce or deport them either. Later on, the PKK have become a great tool to use by many many external powers including the US.
But like I said before, we're just too mixed to be divided. Living together for thousands of years, married to each other and became just too intricate to simply divide. I can give myself for an example. The father side of my family is immigrants from Turkmenistan so I technically call myself much more Turk-er than an average Turkey Turk(for fun, I'm not nationalistic) since Turkish people are a mix of Anatolian/Mid Eastern/Caucasian/Balkan people today. But it's very funny that sometimes some people in Turkey think I am a Japanese or something because of my more original Turkic facial features. Yet, to prove my point, even I have a lot of Kurdish relatives. Last summer, my older brother married a gorgeous(he'd kill me if he knew I said this) green eyed Kurdish girl. And that marriage probably made the number of my Kurdish relatives more than the number of my Turkish relatives. And it's the same everywhere in Turkey. Only Istanbul itself has a great amount of Kurdish population. And likewise, the southeastern Turkey have great amount of Turkish/Turkmen population.
It was a similar situation also with the Arabs and Turkmen in the northern Iraq and Syria. After the Ottoman dissolution those lands became like Northern/Southern Korea near the borders. Millions of people got separated, families were disintegrated.
To me, dividing Turkey, is the last must-be-taken step for some people to make Turkish and Kurdish people as enemies to each other, it's the only way actually. Divide them, separate people, wait for them to forget their ties, and after a few decades implement all the political **** and poison to provoke each side, and congratulations, you have two enemy countries.
Finally, there is one more thing that is in the play. Like most of the time, it's oil. Southestearn Turkey has the only oil resources in the country and the chances are there are more oil reserves there waiting to be discovered. I'm not going to dive into that cause I specifically hate the subject. It's just the game of greedy people.
