Turkey doomed to collapse?. 50379.jpeg
Is this a chain reaction or mass epidemic? Either way, the fact remains - the political upheavals in the Muslim world that began in Tunisia swept across North Africa and Syria, and now a wave of instability has reached Turkey. A member of the Presidium of the Academy of Geopolitical Issues Araik Stepanyan analyzed this complex, ambiguous situation in the country.
"We will identify the external and internal factors that have caused, for the lack of a better word, social unrest in Turkey.
Internal factors have deep roots. The main reason is the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War and the Turkish Republic established by the "father of the Turks" Kemal Ataturk. He decided to raise the status of the ethnic Turks that was low in the Ottoman Empire, turning them into an overriding ethnic group and create a political nation - the Turks.
In 1926, a law was passed stating that all residents of Turkey were ethnic Turks, and different names - the Kurds, Armenians, Laz, Circassian, and so on - were insulting to the Turkish national identity and must not be used. Everybody was recorded as Turks. And, although many years have passed, the first problem in Turkey is a problem of national identity.
There is a huge mass of people, more than half of today's Turkish population, who do not consider themselves Turks. They see themselves as citizens of Turkey, but ethnically they do not identify themselves with the Turks, and do not want to. But because they live in the country where they have to be Turks to have a chance for a career, they are considered Turks. In 2000-2002, Western funds conducted a secret survey of the Turkish population and obtained evidence that only 37 percent of all Turkey residents saw themselves as ethnic Turks. The national issue has aggravated, and rallies and slogans are convincing evidence.
The second internal factor that undermines today's Turkey is a debate about the type of the government - secular or theocratic. The elite of modern Turkey have serious disagreements about this. The heirs of the Ottoman Empire believe that the highest level of prosperity in Turkey was in the days of the Ottoman Empire, where all citizens were equal, except for Christians, and ethnicity was not emphasized. That means, people were Osman regardless of the ethnicity - the Turks, Circassian, or Kurds.
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http://english.pravda.ru/world/asia/20-06-2013/124888-turkey_collapse-0/#
