Since the establishment of the modern state of Turkey in 1923 out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, the newly formed Turkish state abandoned any idea of granting the sizeable population of Kurdish people, mostly living within the south east borders of the state, autonomy or any rights of self-determination as had been stipulated and provided for in the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres, signed just 3 years before in 1920.
Then, following on from the genocidal campaigns against the Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians and other Christian minorities living in Turkey, and after the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 establishing the present-day borders of Turkey, Kurds were denied not just their rights of self-determination but the newly formed ‘Kemalist’ government now announced that any non-Turkish citizen of Turkey will be forcibly ‘Turkified’.
