Eugeniya VASILYEVA

Doctor of Historical Sciences

Russian Academy of Sciences

(Specially for The Energy of Kazakhstan)

We would like to remind the readership that the Russian scholar Vasilyeva�s material has been presented in our last issue {THE GLOBE, #15 (333)}. She narrated about the Kurdish history. In THE ENERGY OF KAZAKHSTAN, THE GLOBE�s supplement (#02, 1999), she has highlighted the issues of economy, tribal relations, religion, language and history of the Kurdish people.

Now we offer a brief review of the Kurdish people�s history in Turkish Kurdistan.

Although national liberation movement of Kurds in Turkish Kurdistan was successfully supressed in the 20-s and 30-s it began to raise head in the sixties inspired by the struggle of Iraqi Kurds. There were a lot of people in Kurdistan sympathising with the ideas of the Party of the Workers of Turkey that was established after the introduction of a new Turkish Constitution in 1961. Political mass-meetings took place in many Kurdish towns. In 1971 the police began mass arresting, underground work became more intense. Some Kurds hid in north Iraq preparing for guerrilla actions in Turkey. The Kurdish movement grew more radical in 1973. When the guerrilla warfare in Iranian Kurdistan became stronger in 1976-77, Turkish Kurds threw them support. Kurdish Workers� Party or PKK (from Kurdish Partiya Karkarani Kurdistan, established on 28 November 1978) declared �anti-colonial war� to �the Turkish colonizers� and soon took a number of Kurdish regions under control. The PKK Secretary General Abdullah Ocalan pierced Kurdish political space like a meteor in early 70-s. In twenty years, June 1993, he said: �When I began to work for my people I had no money, like-minded people, weapon but I had an idea worth a life.... My principles in life urged me to active struggle and for the last twenty years we have been working to see this goal fulfilled�.

In 1980 in spite of the cruel actions and arrests undertook by the Turkish army the guerrilla warfare under the leadership of the PKK went on. Since 1984 the party growing more and more popular began to direct raids far Turkish inland. Not once the army assured they had done away with the PKK but in a few days the partisans responded with a new attack. While Iraqi Kurdistan was on fire in the 60-70-s Turkish officials insisted there was no a Kurdish problem in Turkey. It was no longer possible to disregard it. The Kurdish issue cried at the top of its voice. �Kurdistan Report� wrote in August-September 1995: �In the beginning our leader began to fight alone.... In the end the enemy faces forty-thousand-people army and can not win�. Since 1985 north Kurdistan has been struggling for the survival of the nation, the right of the Kurdish people to make their own fortune in accordance with the norms accepted by the international community. The war has lasted for fourteen years and is unlikely to end in the near future. Time and again the PKK has come forward with peacefull initiatives and calls for a dialogue but they were not considered.

IN COMING ISSUES

�TURKISH ARMY, DEMOCRACY & ISLAM�

by Halit Yildiz alias Halit Zhulduz

(THE GLOBE)

The writer is an ethnic diaspora Kazakh, and a citizen of Turkey. He is neither an advocate for the Turkish Army, nor an apologist for the Islamists in Turkey. He is partial to none, and takes a philopshical and scholarly approach to the subject. He attempts to look into this enigma empirically, which has become a phenomenon of the social, and political spectrum of Turkey.

Turkish army- legacy from the Ottoman period

The Turkish Army is unique in many ways. It traces a part of its legacy from the Ottoman period. The period, when the Janissary corps existed during the latter half of the fourteenth century until 1826. It has not changed much of its character of the role it has contemplated in assigning for itself. That is, GUARDIAN OF THE TURKISH NATION BOTH IN

TIMES OF PEACE AND WAR, AND AGAINST INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL DANGER.