et combien de cadavres depuis que la Turquie tente de rejoindre l'UE ?
For more than 90 years, the Turkish state used the army and police to oppress Kurds demanding recognition of their basic rights
In fact, denial has been a hallmark of successive Turkish governments since the day Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the republic in 1923 and promptly removed every official reference to the Kurds and Kurdistan as well as the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and banned the media from using those terms.
When, for instance, the Kurds of Dersim challenged the state in 1937, Ataturk sent in troops, including his adoptive fighter-pilot daughter, resulting in the deaths of around 40,000 Kurds.
Other parties that came to power after Ataturk, denied that the Kurds existed in Turkey until 1991, justifying their persecution under the rubric of fighting terrorism.
However, in November 1991, then-prime minister Suleyman Demirel said the Kurdish issue was "Turkey's top problem," calling into question the previous oppressive policies.
Now, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, despite its considerable achievements since coming to power in 2002, is using the same "terrorism" label to delegitimize the Taksim protesters.
This is despite President Abdullah Gul admitting that the security approach to the Kurds had failed when he referred to the Kurdish question as Turkey’s “most important problem" in 2011.
As AKP officials want only throw around the “terror” label during protests that Erdogan has described as serving “Turkey’s enemies,” the protesters could also sympathize with thousands of Kurdish children brutalized at the hands of the AKP government’s police:
"Since 2006, thousands of children in Turkey, some as young as 12, have been prosecuted under anti-terrorism legislation solely for their alleged participation in demonstrations focused on issues of concern to members of the Kurdish community," wrote Amnesty International in a June 2010 report.