The Kurds are one of the largest stateless ethnic groups in the world. Their traditional homelands take in parts of several nations, but the largest number of Kurds (12-14 million) live in Turkey, primarily in the southeast. The Kurds of Turkey are not united in their desire for an independent nation. But all are in favor of a change in their status within Turkey where their language, culture, ethnicity, and minority status are not just officially nonexistent but, paradoxically, repressed. Yet until they acquire sovereignty, autonomy, federation status, or merely recognition as a legal minority within the nation, the Kurds will remain the Turkish nation's greatest political problem and its most serious impediment to European Union membership and other associations and developments that the government officially desires in order to achieve parity with other modern states.
There are over 23 million Kurds in the world today and the great majority live in the mountainous region, sometimes called Kurdistan, comprising southeast Turkey and northern portions of Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Although the great majority of Kurds are Sunni Muslims a small number practice other faiths and there are large numbers of Shi'a Muslim Kurds in Iran. The Kurds speak three principal languages: Kurdi, Zaza, and Kurmanji, which is the language of the majority of Kurdish people in Turkey and, as "the literary language of the Kurds," is the "most prestigious of all Kurdish vernaculars" (Entessar 4-5). Although there are considerable divisions among the Kurds themselves most Kurdish nationalists dream of a state that would include all the areas in which there is a Kurdish majority and all the Kurds, no matter which languages they speak or religions they practice. But the desire for a Kurdish state is much stronger among Turkey's Kurds than among the residents of Iran and Iraq where, though frequently subject to considerable discrimination, "ethnic minori...